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I am so weary of the endless stream of self-righteous, self-serving, embarrassingly cliche "anti-establishment" drivel that we've been subjected to over the last couple of days. The truth is, these people are anti-cop to begin with - probably because they have never outgrown an adolescent resentment of authority.The 20 year old morons who burnt cars and smashed windows are only an extreme extension of the same mentality. This is why so many of them are so willing to twist logic to the point of it being unrecognizable in order to lay the blame for the mayhem on the police rather than on the perpetrators. They make it their business to sanctimoniously decry the flaws in those they oppose - yet, apparently being devoid of self-reflection or self-critique, they never investigate how their own biases, predispositions and prejudices shape their perspectives and interpretations of events. They simply assume - "if I think it - it's right!"

I was at King and Bay as those police cars burned in the street - and it wasn't a group of cheerful flower-children preaching peace and love that those individual police officers were facing.....it was an ugly, aggressive mob - taunting them and shouting "FUCK THE POLICE! FUCK THE POLICE!" And within clear sight of the smashed windows and with black smoke billowing between the office towers of their own city, they chanted "SHAME! SHAME!" But of course, their judgement was not levelled at the cowards in masks who fled the scene after causing the damage - but at the police officers who were charged with restoring order.

Trust me, these were not impressive people with deeply held convictions or a strong moral or ethical compass. These were the kind of people, mostly in their 20's, who enjoy spouting hackneyed slogans and mistake it for insight; who get intoxicated with the sense of their own self-importance; and who relish the sense of power that arises as part of a mob mentality.

And remember - those individual officers faced a couple hundred unruly and aggressive people who were flaunting their antipathy for the police and who's actions were totally unpredictable. By contrast, the only reason the demonstrators were comfortable being so brazen was because they were confident in their knowledge that those officers
were compelled to exercise restraint. Some police state.