Toronto g8? Was it that great?

I am interested in the way the 25000 people protested the g8/g20 meeting in Toronto last month. below are some quips from Kevin, a great community organizer I know in Hamilton, who documented and wrote a piece worthwhile to read. spread the word! http://www.maydaymagazine.ca/issue/63

That masked “criminal” running from police on the Summit news footage? More likely a graduate student than a street gang member. That “violent thug” relieving the local Starbucks of its front window-pane? Quite possibly a volunteer, a community gardener, an organizer of festivals, kid’s camps or park clean-ups. From my experience, the majority of young confrontational protestors spend the other 363 non-summit days of the year working passionately for change in their own communities. Anyone who has been involved in sustained activism knows this to be true, but it’s not the picture of wanton criminality that Stephen Harper and Bill Blair would like us to see.

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What reporting of the G8/G20 protest reveals are widespread attempts to characterize certain of these strategies as “peaceful protest” or “acceptable” (voting, NGOs, advocacy work), and others as “violent” or “criminal” (militant street protest, civil disobedience). This tactic then divides young radicals from each other, and from the other groups and organizations (such as unions) that should be in solidarity with them. Police and politicians argue that radical youth are willfully forgoing accepted, effective means of political involvement, while simultaneously denying the fact that these established systems are completely unresponsive to constituencies without economic clout.

http://www.maydaymagazine.ca/issue/63

and must see footage, the largest arrest (1000) in Canadian History

http://toronto.mediacoop.ca/video/torontonians-gather-police-hq-condemn-abuses/4020