To the editor:
Re: "Vancouver city councillors weigh in on riot," July 1.
Amidst the to-ing and fro-ing and the gnashing of teeth about the Stanley Cup riot, one central fact appears to be slipping away.
The rioters, and their lawless looting, are in fact icons of our time. We live in an era where it is considered smart and efficient to dismantle the civil society we inhabit. It is of course not called dismantling. We now have entire university programs dedicated to developing new ways to chop up the efforts and life's work of our grandparents. We now "privatize" and we look for "cost efficiencies" and we seek to "increase productivity" and we seek to "adjust the tax structure." The end result is that anything (pensions, services, institutions, etc.) that has been constructed or negotiated over many years are now considered to be an unfair advantage for a "special interest group."
The belief of the day is that the market will take care of everything and that the quicker we can reorganize our society the better. The small presence of the Vancouver police amidst the chaos was a perfect poetic representation of the current state of the forces trying to fight against the dismantling of the work our parents and grandparents spent their lives building.
The only difference in the analogy is that some of the looters, unlike the corporate class, have publicly apologized.
Bill Hood,
Vancouver
