Kingston ontario - black lives matter et al Event

All photos on this page by YYC
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​Kingston, Ontario - yesterday 6/6/20

​"Black Lives Matter" et al event

What's the "et al" for? Well, this event had more than one theme. One was "Black Lives Matter", of course, in special memory of George Floyd, and the other was "Disarm, Defund, Disband the Police".​​

I asked the fellow holding the banner you see at the left (he's associated with this endeavour) if the group was serious about actually disbanding the police.  He replied that reducing their funding and using the savings to raise the standard of living of the poor (who too often are targeted by police) would be a step in the right direction.

Does a better standard of living for the average human being reduce crime? I think yes. But there's crime, and then there's criminal action taken by the "authorities".


And we can go back a couple of years to Washington state and remember the Asian student - "without an aggressive bone in his body" - who was killed (shot three times by police) on the eve of his graduation from Career Link:

HuffPost: Asian Student Holding A Pen Fatally Shot By Cops Night Before Graduation

• Deputies originally said he was holding a knife or "some sort of sharp object."

HuffPost has also reported a recent very serious complaint against the RCMP by an aboriginal leader:

• “Every time our people do wrong, the RCMP, they always seem to use excessive force — and that has to stop,” he said. “Enough is enough.” 

This is the RCMP who, more strangely than one can imagine, have no clue as to how or why a couple of thousand or so young Canadian aboriginal girls and women have disappeared. And, so far, there has been only lip service paid to this disaster:

CBC: Police co-ordination still lacking a year after inquiry report on missing and murdered Indigenous women

Neither can Canadians ever forget Sammy Yatin, a Syrian boy who at 19 years of age was felled by 8 bullets from the gun of one Toronto police officer who was later convicted of "attempted murder" but was paroled after 2 years in prison.

Not to mention that Toronto is the city that implemented "carding" of all things, and now claims to have (sort of) ended all that ... yet:

• "Where these rules apply — and where they don't — doesn't change anything about carding," ... "A police officer can always say they are investigating a particular crime." 

Yes, they can and they will.

So, yeah: I would agree that maybe we need fewer cops and more attention to improving living conditions and showing a bit of respect for what Trudeau likes to call "ordinary Canadians" - clearly not seeing himself in that category and he and other politicians can flout the restrictions in place to stop the spread of something called the "novel" Covid19.

And if you haven't yet seen the video where Trudeau goes temporarily mute when asked if Canada agrees with Trump on use of the military, you should see it.  He may be a puppet who sometimes forgets his lines, but he can call in the military right here at home whenever he feels it's justified.

Now for the really good stuff: photos of yesterday's protest event ... but first:

In all my years of activism, I don't think I've ever attended such a loving, kind protest event. I wasn't wearing a mask (though most of the attendees were) but I didn't receive a single stony glare of the kind I sometimes encounter when in the vicinity of mask wearers in supermarkets. (Could it be that some supermarket mask wearers don't keep up on current events?) All were warm, smiley, polite -- and young, for the most part. And beautiful. So beautiful. Every last one of them. As you will see below.

The first one is of a girl who reached out to hug me after I took her photo. She was in tears after speaking to the crowd and so was I. I told her that I've protested for a lot of years and ... we both said in unison: "It's still happening".

I should add that my photos don't show the full extent of the crowd that was there. I don't know how many exactly but there were A LOT (the Whig says "hundreds") mostly young adults forming a complete circle around the focal point where people, one by one, made their own personal statements.

It's interesting that behind the second-to-last photo is a Murney tower of which Kingston is proud to boast several. To me it is an image of "white" conquest, an image of death. Read here and see why. Sadly, the page also includes mention of a death caused as a direct result of lack of maintenance of this particular relic:

• The danger of not maintaining the tower was revealed when ... a major windstorm blew the roof right off the tower. Tragically, the roof killed a small boy who was in the park across the street from the tower.

The final image below is of a young couple whom, luckily, I met on the street when I couldn't find the event venue, it having moved to a much larger area with a view of the lake, in front of City Hall. They were friendly and cheerful and didn't mind my tagging along with them.

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