Manif jour 18.

I had an argument with my friend Andrea today about the disruption of the Grand Prix. She has huge ethical issues with the Grand Prix, but she doesn't think the protesters are disrupting the F1 thing because of ethical issues related to the event itself. They are disrupting it, she thinks, to get back at the government. Are they going to do the same thing to the jazz festival? To other summer events? Mostly, the people who will be hurt by this are the small business owners and the people who rely on these events to survive. Potential investors in Quebec--especially in entertainment and tourism--are going to be hesitant to put dollars here. The city already took two bad hits with the referrenda and it never got back to where it was in the late 1960s as a world class city.

Basically, while she thought the pots and pans were beautiful and represented a peaceful way to bring all kinds of people together, the disruption of the tourist events is just going to sour public opinion and make the future for young Quebeckers even worse than it already is.

Honestly, I'm not arguing with any of that. But I do think that the F1 should be disrupted, both for ethical reasons, and in order to make it clear that all is not right here and that people are spending their dollars in a place that is corrupt and burdened with unjust laws.

There's no winning, either way, but one has to weigh the importance of bringing in tourist dollars to prop up a shitty government that espouses a system that is running economies all around the world into the dirt, in favour of the profits of a few fat cats at the top, against the possibility that a sustained and coordinated resistance of this system might lead to long term sustainability, despite the agonizing transition that such resistance will inevitably entail.