It’s been daunting to try to take in all that has been already testified, discussed, debated, ranted about, witnessed and reported of the G20 protests. Thoughts collected so far:

1) We are, as many have remarked, living in a police state.

2) There appears to be a truly disturbing amount of consent to this on the part of your average citizen. Call it fascism or what you will, but many of us seem to be just fine with the idea that assembling in the streets to express dissent gives the people with guns and money the right to beat, detain, abduct and assault us.

3) The arrogance displayed by Toronto’s chief of police and the Ontario government in peddling outright lies before the public is spectacular. It will be incredibly damaging to whatever tattered remnants of faith in a democratic process remain if this criminal conduct goes unpunished.

4) The brute force, the “Cop Amok” tactic on display, was a demonstration to all of us that, to Harper and the rest of the world’s royalty — squatting behind their expensive fences — we are all potentially “criminals,” no matter how meekly we act. They want to beat us down until we no longer dare raise our heads to whimper.

Passionate debates around tactics are currently raging in re-energized social justice circles. I’m not going to rehearse the debates — we’ve all been reading and engaging in them. It’s good that we’re having them, good to see this energy, although it has been dearly bought. The story here is no longer about the G8/G20 and some of us have chosen to bemoan this as obscuring the “real issues.” Well, a police state is a real issue. It’s linked to all the other issues that protesters march for. It’s an issue that we can all get behind and mobilize around.

While many have rushed to condemn the acts of some on the march or label them provocateurs, I’ve been reluctant to do this. I don’t want to scab for the buffoons who keep flashing the same photos of the same burning cars at us for a periodic Two Minutes’ Hate. “Black bloc,” they intone. Big Brother. “B-B. B-B. B-B.”

Condemnations range from “a few jerks ruined it from everybody” to “of course, they must be police agents.” I recognize the compulsion to “tsk” at acts that many of us find senseless and disturbing but I’m not going to indulge it this time. My standpoint just feels too plushy and privileged in the face of the stories coming out of the protests. Denunciations and condemnations are black-and-white gesture that don’t really answer these questions: Who did they injure? Who did they kill? Who did they assault? Who did they imprison?

Instead, let’s set aside all bloody labels for a minute. How I wish more of us would actively use our own words, not stale rhetoric and prefabricated clichés, to describe our realities. Those in power are always trying to frame and describe reality for us. Observe the unedited videos. Cameras were everywhere for this protest. People walking and filming, flashing photos from cellphones, handheld video cams. Video is a flat eye moving with crowds. It doesn’t capture that peculiar exhilaration of crowds, but I can sense it in the young people who are streaming down the street, followed by masses of others busy taking photos and videos. As others have pointed out, none of our billion dollar babies are around.

The crowd is moving in a dance, a random, chaotic pattern like traffic. It works well because these scatters and bursts are so unexpected, an eddy of movement, a pirouette of a masking umbrella before the unforgiving eye of the camera. It is — elegant. Nobody is getting pushed or shoved. But every now and then, a figure will beat itself against a window like a dark moth or heave an object at it. Some windows shatter, some don’t.

Some of the crowd’s targets don’t make sense to me. The sight of people huddled in the Eaton Centre and shattered windows jolts my conditioning, awakens my inner cop. “Destructive,” I mutter, tensing against these sights. But I have to admit to a moment of giddy delight when a group halts in front of a porno shop and hurl the dismembered white limbs of a mannequin hauled out of a clothing boutique defiantly skywards at its marquee.

The camera lingers on a group of, unmistakably, youth, hunkered down on the meridian of the street, over a patch of crumbling paving stones, taking them up, letting them drop. This absurd act recalls the Situationist slogan “Under the paving stones, the beach.” To me, Toronto is a city of gray paving stones, groaning under the ever-increasing teetering piles of costly skyboxes like mirages floating along the waterfront, looming over the highway. The sheer futility of trying to rip away any of it! Yet, the scrabbling of the bare hands of small, skinny kids in sneakers hunched over these stones, the small crack in the crushing omniscience of metres-deep concrete, is powerful. It touches me.

Youth are facing the future of no jobs, no pensions, scarce health care and mis-education, no clean air, poisoned water, polluted earth, wars without end, and a surge of fascism that is sprouting like mould in a nation that complacently brags of its kindliness. They are being repeatedly, violently, told to shut up about it. The G20 protests were the state eating its young and complaining about indigestion. That’s what I see when I look at this footage.

As the stories of the protests continue to emerge, my hope is the pre-digested reality spoonfed to us from the lips of leaders will break down enough for us to continue to feel, articulate and act on the momentum of our rage.

Aalya Ahmad

Aalya Ahmad

Aalya Ahmad has a PhD in comparative literature, a crush on George Orwell and a rather impressive collection of cloth bags from the various public service unions she has worked with over the years....