If there’s a side in all this protest that wants nobody to trust anyone else, they’re winning.  I don’t trust protestors that are sheltering bunches of “smashies” who ran around in balaclavas, smashing windows near where I work.  I don’t trust cops who bludgeon their way into crowds and arrest journalists.  I don’t trust self-righteous pontificating bloggers (so don’t trust me!) who aren’t embedded, pretend any of either “side” is justified.  I don’t trust sweaty Dmitri Soudas when is says “it was fine in Pittsburgh, Seattle, London” (hint: those were far worse).

I don’t trust the self-righteous television broadcasters talking about how “this isn’t REALLY Canada”.  I think we need to accept that everywhere is more or less everywhere else, at this point.  Adam Carolla, usually not a font of geopolitical insight (actually who am I kidding, he’s very insightful even if often willfully ignorant, particularly about geopolitics) said something that echoed McLuhan but was way more germane: “the second some guy turned on a cellphone or logged onto the Internet, it stopped being about countries and borders and just became one big country.”

This stuff is all connected.  If Canada has to get a bit more like Africa or India in order for us to understand how much Africa, India are suffering to make us so comfortable here in Canada, and that gets us to DO something about it, that’s sort of a step in the right direction.  My problem is that we have here a failure to communicate.  Window-smashers are inarticulate assholes without a political wing. And cops have no patience for this — they’re paid to be bouncers here.

So look at what we’ve got here today: nobody understanding or trusting each other, when we should be shocking people into awareness.