I recently posted a short article about a car rally at Wasaga Beach. While Day 1 of the event was calm, by Saturday, some hooligans vandalized police cars. Thigs got completely out of hand, but that doesn’t reflect the whole event, or all those who attended.
In the days since the car rally, there’s been a lot of media attention of the event, for all the wrong reasons. No articles about the diversity of the car community. Only sensationalism about the small group that caused big trouble. For example, the opening lines of the Toronto Sun article by Joe Warmington (below) paints such a dark, ominous picture of the event at Wasaga Beach, you’d think the H20i car rally was run by blood thirsty vampires!
“Scary,” say witnesses. “Out-of-control mayhem.”
It looked like something out of Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell or Ozzy Osbourne’s Patient Number 9 video.
As the mayor of the famous summer fun town rightly said, it’s fortunate no one was seriously hurt or killed as a result of the third straight year of the unpermitted H20i rally of high-performance muscle cars.
This car rally was attended by young millennials in their Japanese and German tuner cars, not ‘boomers’ in American muscle-cars from the olden days. Social media reaction has been stunning; polar opposite opinions. From Wasaga residents calling for teenagers to be thrown in jail and given long sentences, to folks suggesting that the same behaviour by Gen Xers at Wasaga was ignored by police in the past.
As an unsanctioned events (authorization was not sought or granted for the rally) protocols for large crowds were not triggered. This is why police were so unprepared. As one commenter said “The town should have welcomed the drivers with a town organized H20i event – organized for revenue, entertainment, safety and peace.”. It’s not like Wasaga Beach didn’t know that H20i was coming.
~ by Chris #16 Demaras ~
