While the warmth of the kissing couple may have brought a ray of sunshine to an otherwise horrific end to Stanley Cup series, other social media offerings from the Vancouver riots demonstrate just how low people will go in order to have what they perceive as a good time. Somewhere along the lines, if only at the baser level, these hoodlums have a thought like this: “Hey, our team got smashed by the Bruins, so let’s go around turning cars over and setting stuff on fire!!!!”
And, for some reason, this is considered a good idea.
Mind you, post sporting event riots have long been a custom of winning teams, but in this day and age of social media, where everyone with a mobile device is an amateur film-maker/journalist/paparazzi member, the content we’re privy to is unlike any time before it. The fact that the kissing couple went viral is a good example of the power of social media, but there are other, perhaps less-viewed pieces of content that contain absolutely none of the happy feelings Alexandra Thomas and Scott Jones provided.
Over at reddit, the following video was featured, and, like the title of this article says, it shows just how pathetically senseless people can be when they are committed to being apart of an unruly mob that’s bent on destruction. Much to some of these mob members’ surprise, however, some of the intended victims decided to fight back:
Whatever vitriol you have after watching that towards the people latching on to the “mob mentality” excuse, in an effort to turn the car over, the second-most popular comments at YouTube for the video sum it up quite nicely:
Man… these people are less than animals. What a horrifying video. Congrats, Vancouver. You’ve done your city, province, and country proud. Terrorizing young women. Real classy.
While there’s a little Internet white knight-ing going on here, to their credit, the young women in question refused to be terrified, and instead, they fought back. The part where the hooded punk gets dragged out of the crowd to receive some well-deserved fisticuffs was indeed inspiring.
How about the Bruins fan who got caught up in the rush of humanity, and knocked out cold by the security team sweeps? I wonder how he feels about Vancouver:
Hey, at least some Vancouver fans helped him out, unfortunately, there weren’t enough of them to stem the tide.
Then there are such things as the following video, which features some poor soul getting absolutely blindsided by an anonymous coward. Warning, the following images may be somewhat disturbing:
There’s nothing more brave or “bad-ass” than knocking someone out cold, especially when they aren’t looking and you can land a nice, unexpected sucker punch? Well done. It should be noted that the person who got smashed was labeled as a rioter, although, his behavior in the video looked benign. From this writer’s perspective, the sneak attack is a much, much better indicator of the moral character that clearly took over downtown Vancouver after the Bruins won the Stanley Cup.
It should be noted this article only features three videos, but all them do a great job of capturing the chaos in Vancouver, and two of them do a great job of demonstrating just how many stand-up people come out when riots break out.