What? It's a Game!

There's the shame, writ large on the face of every Canadian who's ever sneered at the hooliganism of British and Latin American soccer players. The disbelief that this would happen in Canada is shared by many. So there's the shame all right, and where's the blame? It's all over the place. Wouldn't we like to believe that there were foreign interlopers who decided to go amok in Vancouver, not native-born Canadians?

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A Vancouver Canucks fan waves a Canadian and British Columbia flag in front of an overturned burning pickup truck during riots in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia after the Canucks lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup playoffs to the Boston Bruins on June 15. The crowd of more than 100,000 Canadian hockey fans turned violent after the game. Anthony Bolante/Reuters

But then of course there's the reality of the kind of destructive violence that also took place in Toronto last summer during the G-8 conference, where social radicals and anarchists mingled with peaceful protesters and torched police cars, broke shop windows, looted and violently attacked people. So Canadians are just as capable of hosting within their communities social misfits and goons as anywhere else in the world.

It's a game. Isn't the outcome of a game supposed to reflect good gamesmanship, complete with a spirit of being a 'good sport', accepting that circumstances, luck and sometimes just plain old superior professionalism in the sport paid off, with one team's win and another one's limping home a loser? It's all in the game and the spirit brought to the game, isn't it? (Guess we should really ask Montreal about that.)

Oh, it isn't? It isn't quite that at all? It's the "win" mentality that absorbs juvenile minds in the absence of military clashes when two countries engage in conflict. It's a blot, actually, on the reputation of the country whose idiotic young people choose to get drunk and inflict their juvenile sensibilities on the others within society who don't subscribe to such antics.

In this instance, much damage was done both to Vancouver's reputation and by extension, Canada's, along with material and property damage in the hundreds of thousands. A massive clean-up operation with volunteers from the community and from among those responsible-minded individuals who attended the event was launched.

And video cameras, which were everywhere, recording exactly what was occurring when the brainless twits went berserk smashing everything before them, will reveal some identities. Without doubt those with a personal conscience and knowledge and information will also step forward to redeem the situation.

Those responsible for Vancouver's black eye will be held to account. Stupid, stupid.