Missing the Madness

I missed the G20. Not by choice, I didn't intentionally avoid all of this chaos, but I had to go home last week for a court date that I could not reschedule. I'm disappointed to have missed all of this insanity. Last Thursday I received periodic text updates about the developing pandemonium, but it wasn't the same as being here.

Since returning this afternoon, I've heard reports from my roommate and friends about the craziness that went down, and I wish I could have witnessed it to make my own judgments. My roommate was adamant in reiterating how foolish all of the student protesters were. She has very little patience for our peers sometimes, and finds their attempts at protests useless and embarrassing. She relayed to me witnessing a kid who shoved his video camera in a police officer's face, after the officer ordered him to get off of the Union lawn. According to my roommate Katie, the kid demanded "Why are you doing this, man?? Why are you doing this?!" to which the officer replied, "Get that camera out of my face."
Katie cannot stand college kids who act like they're fighting the power by bothering cops who are only doing their jobs, and protesting a summit they probably know very little about.

My friend Brandon thinks both the protesters and police officers were a little ridiculous, and played off each other in a more dramatic way than necessary. He told me about his friend's attempt to "protest the protesters" on Thursday afternoon - an ironic approach I find sort of funny, but mostly ridiculous. Brandon described this kid's protest as featuring lines like: "You do not understand human nature" and "What do we like?!" "Hot Dogs!"
This approach may be amusing, but it too seems like a waste of time.

I wish I had been here last week so I could offer my own opinion about this G20 madness. Seeing photos and watching videos of the rioting has been surreal. It must have been unreal to see Forbes transformed that way. It's something that will (probably, hopefully?) never happen again, and it would have been interesting to have been a part of it.