8 - Sunday, August 25, 1991 - North Shore News

GUEST COLUMNIST...

A riot in Lotus Land

1 AM still puzzling over the midnight riot in Penticton
over the Peach Fest weekend a couple of weeks ago.

As riots go, it wasn't auch, |
suppose; a few thousand kids
milling around, shouting and yell-
ing, running and jumping,
pushing and shoving. Not to men-
tion swigging and snorting. And
of course, busting into stores, do-
ing damage, swiping stuff, having
a good time.

What you might call a minor
league affair. Nothing to get ex-
cited about, it’s summer, kids will
be kids. And what's the big deal,
after all? A fev dozen people with
cuts and bruises, a scattering of
arrests, a little tear gas, a dozen
or so broken windows and a few
thousand dollars’ damage done.

But nobody killed. No bodies in
the streets. No explosions, no
fires, no weapons discharged.
None of the tragedy that accom-
panied some of the more promi-
nent riots of our times: Watts,
Berkley, Tiananmen Square, or
even the jolly good fun that so
frequently rounds out the after-
noon at English football matches.

Stil, a riot is a riot, and the
Penticton version got me thinking
about riots as social phenomena,
Certainly they can happen any-
where.

TV libtaries are full of action
footage of cops using billies on
hordes of rack-throwing citizens
in Asia and Latin America. Lan-
don, Paris, Moscow and Budapest
come to mind among European
capitals as. the sites of spectacular
riots,

Then there are our local ones,
like the 1989 and 1990 B.C. Days
in Penticton, or the 1986 and 1987
Kelowna Regattas, or the run of

sold just like that.”

“| finally realized that I just couldn’t take care of
my home and huge lot in White Rock all by
myself anymore. And my daughter and family
live in North Vancouver, so it was a long way for
them to come and visit as often as they‘ like.
One day when I was cutting the lawn it just came
to me. I put up a ‘For Sale’ sign and the house

(shown with granddaughter Leslie)

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By Brian Swarbrick
Contributing Writer

near-riots at the White Rock an-
nual sand castle competitions.

But how do they happen? What
essential ingredient has to be pres-
ent in order for a group of citi-
zens to turn into a mob? At what
point does individual action
become group action? At what
point does the group action turn
violent?

Could there possibly be any
relationship between what occur-
red on a hot summer night in the
B.C. resort city of Penticton and,
say, the bloody toll of human life
in Peking's Tiananmen Square?

From what [ can gather from
psychologists and the police, there
are only two common
denominators in all riots; hostility
and anonymity.

If there are enough people in a
large group who are feeling hostile
towards something (whatever that
something may be) almost any is-
cident can set them off. And they
assume they can get away with
their own contribution to the gen-
eral violence because they have
anonymity in numbers.

Well, that helps to explain the
situation in’ Peking. Crowds are
constant round the clock in the
Chinese capital, and there’s no
doubt the populace has been made
hostile by the highly restrictive
measures imposed by the Com-
munist Party.

But) Penticton? Hostility? A
bunch of kids on a summer holi-

Mamie Walker

day evening? Where would the
hostility conie from?

One place.

JoozK.

From what ! can gather from
thase same psychologists and
police officers, the third common
denominator in 8.C.’s riot: situa-
tions is alcohol. Not sometimes.
Always.

It is the one ever-present com-
ponent that triggers the hostility,
while at the same time it dims the
reasoning faculties.

ff we cut out the booze at large
public gatherings, we would prov-
ably never see another riot in B.C.
But it’s not likely to happen.

This is a laissez-faire province.
They don’t call us Lotus Lang for
nothing. We fike the idea of
everyone doing his thing.

If a man wants to get smashed,
we think he ought to be able to do
it wherever feeis good to him. Not
just at home. Not just in’ the
booze can where there’s some
pressure on the management to
keep him under control.

No, we tend to favor the notion
that he can do his drinking any
time and any place he feels like it.

So it's noo surprise that the
media played their annual sucker
role of faithfully reporting some
of the younger citizens’ claims
that the whole blame for the Pen-
ticton ciot lay with the police. If
some of the officers had not been
so forceful in’ their curbing of
rowdy crowd behavior, none of
the bad stuff would have bhappen-
ed.

Maybe so. But what makes me
nervous is to think about what
might have happened that hot
summer night in Penticton if there
had been no police presence.

ARDAGH HUNTER TURNER

Barristers & Solicitors

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