Kat_YYZ
Senior Member
To chip in here, as one of the protestors at the heated Scarborough debate, we also had some extremely pleasant conversations with passers-by outside after the debate. Some curious, some with things they wanted to say. One man for example had no idea the police ITO documents were publicly available and was very interested (and shocked) in the information we could give him. Two other young men talked for quite some time - both were from visible minorities, and both in different ways pointed out that immigrant communities are socially conservative and may in fact support Ford in his homophobic positions. One young man who stuck around for quite some time started out by saying "all politicians lie" but did end up offering his opinion on Ford, which is that he should have stepped down after his rehab. They may not have been FN infantry, but they were more than willing to talk it out a bit.
this is great. this is the kind of thing that is important. if you run into pro-Ford types, talk to them. If they are of the Iola Fortino variety -- run away!! But there are soft supporters out there, and they are not all violent, intransigent or crazy. We here forget that not everyone has read every little thing about Rob Ford. Just because there's an information superhighway out there, doesn't mean everyone is jumping on it. And if they don't care about one issue (not marching at PRIDE) they might care about another.
I like the tweet/storify posts that Andray Domise makes -- the one about the young man who wants to put a community centre in Rexdale and others show concrete examples of how the Fords have let the community down. He's not just yelling about how they are Fords so they must be bad, or bringing up crack or whatever; he really spells it out. His attacks on Doug Ford are spot on, and none of it is personal.
(though I wish A.D. would tweet a bit less, he's really monopolizing my TL and the "stories" should just go on a blog and he can tweet links to them, not break up essays into 20 tweets)