We’ve all noticed by now that (if those in charge let you, at least) you get the real “news”, the most important take-away message — the pulse of the nation — in a newspaper’s comments section, below the article purporting to be the star attraction.
Case in point:
In response to Brian Hutchinson’s eyewitness reporting from the Vancouver hockey riot:
Who are these people? Thousands, thousands, thousands of them. Laughing. Delighted with the destruction. And these were not just the sort of young men that I first witnessed goading others on, encouraging the violence. These were older people too, middle aged men and women, their eyes opened wide with amazement. They were giggling. Enjoying it.
I found that paragraph interesting. Every society has poorly socialized morons like those who initiated the chaos, but what accounts for the apparent enjoyment experienced by other, better assimilated members of the middle class?
I suspect many in the supportive audience endorse, at least outwardly, “human rights commissions”, prohibitions against “hate speech”, and Canadian society’s constant pressure to be “nice” and to show “understanding” in response to antisocial behavior.
I wonder, though, if under that apparent passivity lurks a suppressed fury that enjoys, at least vicariously, the casting off of a suffocating social restraint.
How odd that this ordinary fellow has hit upon it so precisely, but Professional Journalists express feigned or real amazement at this increasingly commonplace phenomenon:
The ordinary, average, “nice,” “peaceful” Canadian finally getting the chance to wrest themselves, if even for a few hours, from the stranglehold the Establishment has on them.
