A couple of years ago, St. Patrick's day parties in London, Ontario got out of control and resulted in a riot big enough to make the BBC World news crawl. As a resident of rival Kitchener-Waterloo, I have to admit to a sense of schadenfreude. But like the schadenforde from watching Toronto struggle with Rob Ford, an honest person has to admit that it could happen anywhere. London students are no more unruly than anyone else's, and here in a city with two universities and a college, it could just as soon happen in KW.
And sure enough, it is. It turns out that St. Patrick's day parties near KW's universities have been growing, to the point that police are taking notice. It's much like the end-of-school-year parties that used to trouble the same neighborhoods. So now they're trying to reduce the St. Patrick's parties using the same strategy: by setting up a more organized rival party to encourage less anarchic revelry.
But as with the Ford situation, there is also some genuine schadenfreude, and that comes from watching a problem blow up in society's face, after we collectively looked the other way for so long. We know that underage drinking is epidemic, and teens get trained early on that recreation means drinking, and drinking means drinking 'til you pass out. Then we send them away from supervision for the first time, and it's to a place where there's lots of stress and little time for relaxation, and where alcohol consumption is a big joke.
It's obviously a recipe for disaster. Rather than be surprised at the London riot, we should be surprised it doesn't happen more often. But instead we look the other way and pretend it's not a problem, or at least not a problem that affects us.
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