Poor Pride Toronto.
It seems everyone is out to get you.
There’s that whole Middle East problem that somehow has become a sword for any yokel who dislikes a few hundred thousand people getting together to celebrate diversity. Hey JDL and QuAIA – Thanks for bringing your fight to the mix and stop me if I’m wrong, but a festival about sexual freedoms is not a place for airing out your Forever War, even if you tack on the word “Queer” to your cause. Pride is now officially like a high school house party for theatre fags where the chess club shows up and insists on taking the B52s off the stereo and putting on Nana Mouskouri. ZZZ.
Meanwhile, at city hall…I imagine the mayor and his right winged goonsquad are melodramatically twirling their mustaches, thinking up ways to defund you. Like setting public opinion upon you by ramping up buzzwords like “hate speech”, painting you as being dis-organized, therefore not deserving the dollars. Seriously Pride Toronto, watch these guys. They’ve shown in the past they’d be happier if you didn’t exists at all, let alone being forced to give you money.
And at the Sun (snicker) newspaper, some hack awful reporter (who has her nose quite far up the mayor’s ass) is going behind your back telling religious leaders to lean on city council reps to de-fund you due to hateful messages in your parade.
Remember when you had to deal with naked people? Good times…
So what do you do?
I’m going to tell you what to do and you can do what you like:
Cancel Pride.
Hear me out: I’ve always thought the best advice for dealing with children who are throwing fits is to calmly stop, let them run their course, then punch them in the face.
Okay now I’m dead serious about this. Please cancel Pride for one year and let the city wonder where the couple hundred million dollars in tourist money went. Let these petulant whiners wonder how the city came up a few hundred million dollars short in the budget because of all the product placement, transactions and advertisements suddenly stopped flowing from business to business. Let the businesses who lose out without Pride deal with the mayor and the right-winged reporters and religious goons. Money has a funny way of shutting people up.
4 thoughts on “Shattered Pride”
pride should be ploitical, and if some of the troubles going on force it to be political again, i’m all for it. who cares if some ridiculous corporations fuck off? they add nothing to the event beyond some money, and the best prides never have anything to do with corporate dollars.
and the whole anti-palestinian stance is going to backfire on those israelis who rely on sympathy for their position. you don’t get to be assholes without people calling you assholes, no matter how many millions of your ancestors were killed in a horrifying fashion. the holocaust was terrible and israeli treatment of other semitic people is wrong – two separate things can both be awful at the same time.
i’d like to see the parade swerve off route with no warning and go directly to city hall. and then we string up that asshole rob ford.
I wouldn’t say the Pride Committee are morons. I would say they were slow to react and fumbled the ball on this whole Apartheid issue but it seems to have come about because they didn’t have policy regarding this kind of thing. But that’s like saying you should design airplanes so they don’t fly into skyscrapers.
true to lumbering committees, however, they now have “hate speech” policies in place, a year after the fact and with bending to city council threats.
The more I think about this, the more it seems like the right thing to do, especially if Pride is borne from protest and political posturing.
i’m totally behind this….except the morons who actually run pride couldn’t figure out how to cancel it if they needed to. and yes the counter argument is “well then get your ass in there, volunteer, get involved, yadda yadda. i’m secure enough in my lack of ability and talent to tell you i’m not the one to solve this but someone with more than half a brain better get in there or it’s going to cancel itself permanently.
Actually, this is a brilliant idea. All these idiots understand is money, so hit them where it hurts.