You Should Have Stayed at Home

For our first blog entry after reading week, we were given a research quest to do. We were told to watch an episode of The Fifth Estate called "You Should Have Stayed at Home".  I had never even heard of The Fifth Estate before (I'm extremely T.V. illiterate), so I had no idea what this video could have been about. What I ended up watching was a 45 minute long thing about the G20 in Toronto over the summer. 


I thought that the episode was really interesting. I work at a summer day camp during the summer and babysit so I usually don't sit down and watch T.V. at all so this is something I knew a bit about but not a whole lot. I found it really resembled the Oka Crisis, but lacked the attention and the care that the Oka Crisis received. What I mean by this is that Canadians aren't standing up afterwards and really questioning why G20 protesters were handled as they were. Maybe because we're all so ethnically different we don't have the bonding and background that aboriginals have? It's interesting to see how passive a country can become over something so violent that happened when it was not okay and stirred a commotion 20 years ago during Oka. 


I was really appalled at the violence that took place, but I must say that I'm not really surprised. I've seen violence from police happen at my school. Clearly not on the same scale, but enough that this didn't really surprise me because I've had negative interaction with the police in high school for doing nothing. 


The temporary jail thing that they had set up was really disgusting, made it seem to me like they were planning to just arrest people and throw them into jail before it even happened. The treatment of people who were arrested was appalling, no dignity at all. There's definitely a difference between being a murderer and being a peaceful protester, but I still think they both deserve to be treated decently and like people. The fact that people were throwing up peace signs and screaming peaceful protest and still got arrested and were subject to police brutality is just awful.