Even though I’ve been away from Canada for coming up to three years this fall, actually longer if you count my two years in India as well, I still turn to news in my home country first. I’ve been away, but Toronto is my home. I was mortified to see the G20 protests unfold and the police state that resulted. I read about massive random arrests and also a few middle of the night arrests while people were sleeping (turned out to be mistaken identity in that one, even though the police busted down the door and pulled the husband out of his bed). I couldn’t believe that this was happening in my sleepy, home town, which usually boasts a murder rate of between 60 and 100 people a year, this rate, in a city of close to 5 million (give or take).

I had always been a resident of downtown Toronto, and loved the fact that Central Toronto was very much a small town in a big city. If you lived downtown, you stayed downtown. We used to joke to one another that you would never go north of Bloor, as it was as good as going to the boonies; no one ever needed to go ‘up there’ (an attitude that makes me flinch now when I think about it). But as I sat behind my computer screen reading the news and watching the footage of the summit as it played out, I could barely recognize my city and just couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like during the security build-up and the ensuing rioting that took place. I’m sure you all are aware of what went down in Toronto better than I.

Perhaps I too might have been arrested walking back home from work?

Even more distressing, I turned to Google news a few days ago and discovered that Kelly Pflug-Back, the 21-year-old daughter of a good friend of mine had been arrested and charged with serious crimes related to the G20 summit protests. She was singled out on the G20 most wanted list as a facilitator of the damage that took place in the downtown core.

I have known Kelly for the better part of her twenty-one years, and I know for a fact that she is an intensely passionate and intelligent young woman who does not just sit around expecting the world to come to her. Kelly’s a voracious reader and I remember one poignant visit from her and her mother at my place in Kensington Market. The topic always turned to books and when I asked her what she was reading, she replied, “Oh, I’ve been going through the existentialists lately.” Kelly had just turned 13.

Her early reading habits have certainly paid off because at the age of 14 she won third place in the “This Magazine Great Literary Hunt”, a very well respected contest that attracts poets from across the country (usually adults). That she won this contest at such a young age says something about the sort of depth and feeling of which she is capable. After winning this contest, she has since published her work in many more literary magazines and anthologies – publishing venues that some poets work for years to get published in. In 2007 at the ripe age of 18, she won second place in another prestigious contest, this time with the Canadian League of Poets in their Poetic Licence Contest for Canadian Youth. And this month she’s won first place in yet another: the Will Albrecht Literary Prize for young writers (in California). In short, this young woman is a gifted writer and as it turns out, an equally talented visual artist as well. She is currently enrolled in the Fine Arts Program at Guelph University.

Not only does she spend a great deal of time working on her poetry and her fine arts degree, but she also manages to find the time to work with street youth and the homeless, by providing counseling, nutrition advice, and also organizing and serving hot meals to the homeless every Sunday in the town square in Guelph. On top of all this, she’s been heavily involved in the Hanlon Creek development as an environmental activist. If anything Kelly has impressive time management skills.

The public having learned where to project their outrage are shocked, and the comments on both of the CBC articles and on every other report since then reflect a kind of public lynching that one would have expected in another era. She hasn’t even been tried in the court of law, yet in most people’s minds, she’s already guilty, and is labeled as such through comments in the media.

The Internet has truly evolved into the small global village that McLuhan predicted years ago. It’s gone beyond that and has become the global creepy small town, where vigilantism, usually anonymous is both acceptable and a viable form of entertainment. Recently, an 11 year old girl was attacked by a group of such vigilantes to the point where all of her parent’s confidential information was displayed, resulting in the girl having to be put in a safe house, under police protection. The moral majority, so called ‘white hat hackers’ on 4ch@n thought her parents should have been monitoring her Internet activities more closely. A New York Times article, “China’s Cyberposse” goes into some depth on how Internet vigilantism has reached a near frenzy in some parts of China. Called ‘Human Flesh Search Engines’, ‘netizens’ out adulterers and anybody else they deem undesirable, by publicly humiliating them, forcing people out of their jobs and sometimes worse.

I find myself cringing when I read the comments in the Canadian news. They are never that interesting, and tend to be very reactionary. I hate to admit this, but I find myself turning to other news outlets like the New York Times or even Huffington Post, more and more, where there is an actual discussion going on in the comments. Compare those discussions with comments made about Kelly’s arrest. Well, no, don’t, or you might become as disillusioned as I am.

Here is a link to some of Kelly’s poetry published online in Ditch Magazine | Poetry That Matters.