I realize that I should put this riot story in the rear view mirror, but here is my last comment about Vancouver.
Those of us that live east of the left coast were certainly not shocked by the spontaneous outburst of stupidity on the Vancouver streets.
Vancouver has a bad track record when it comes to sporting events. My earliest recollection of football included the 1966 story of a drunken riot in downtown Vancouver before the Saskatchewan Roughriders claimed their first football championship.
I was 11-years-old at the time and I could not connect the dots between drunken idiocy and the fact that my Riders were in the big game.
My older sister had just moved out to Vancouver to take a nursing job and experience life in the big city.
At the time I felt that she had made a very bad decision based upon the events of the 1966 Grey Cup.
The next summer, in 1967, I spent a few weeks with her in Vancouver and I could fully understand the magic of a West Coast summer. The absence of riots helped shape my opinion.
But Vancouver has always struck me as a place where people can live outside of the normal boundaries.
It has nude beaches, an eclectic mix of people and a generally open philosophy about personal expression.
And therein also lies the potential for bigger problems. Within a libertarian style attitude also lurks the potential for people to abuse the privilege.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t advocate a jack boot-to-the-throat style of public control, but I do recognize that we have people that will abuse their right to freedom of expression.
For them, the idea of anarchy is a very appealing freedom of expression, one that includes arson, destruction and looting.
These foot soldiers from the Evil Three Stooges Battalion are capable of just about anything—including the wholesale destruction of a city’s downtown core and very reputation.
None of the post Stanley Cup events should have come as a major surprise to the city officials in Vancouver. They should be truly embarrassed and accountable for their lack of foresight.
How could they not fully expect this fiasco?
They referred back to the relative calm of the Olympics without any assessment of the massive security arrangements that were in place during the Games.
The city was a fortress during the Winter Olympics with a huge team of security and an even bigger tab for the additional police support, largely due to fear of terrorism.
But the final game of the 2011 Stanley Cup series had disaster written all over it. A Canucks victory would not have prevented massive stupidity and wholesale destruction in the downtown core.
The fact that previous downtown events during the playoffs had been relatively trouble-free meant nothing when it came down to the final game.
Vancouver’s army of lowlifes saved their best for last, and that was clearly their intention from the beginning of the Stanley Cup finals.
They took a page out of the 1994 playoffs and upgraded the entire program.
The evil misfits counted on the notion that stupidity is very contagious in large crowds when booze is flowing like the Fraser River and they worked the room of over a hundred thousand to find like-minded idiots.
The tragedy is that these room temperature IQ anarchists outsmarted the people in charge of Vancouver. The police officers on duty must have had a big Little Big Horn moment in that crowd, and they can lay that feeling of utter helplessness right at the feet of their senior management team.
It was an absolute disgrace to witness the carnage on TV, but the lack of foresight matches the events on the streets that night.
Even a little of the latter would have prevented most of the former.
Jim Sutherland can be reached at jim@mystarcollectorcar.com