A recent incident at a Vancouver Pizza Pizza outlet has attracted a lot of attention. David Ball reports:
In the final hour of Feb. 20, two smartly dressed, middle-aged white guys cruising around Vancouver decided they had a hankering for pizza. The stakes seemed pretty low when they pulled into Pizza Pizza, a glowing outpost in an otherwise dimly lit plaza on the eastern edge of the Kitsilano neighbourhood.
But within a few minutes a video camera had captured the men screaming bigoted insults at the young workers and boasting of their riches compared to the servers “worth zero.”
On their way out of the store, a recording shows, the men encountered an apparently Asian teenager and physically attacked him.
The incident made the news and soon it was announced that Brenton Woyat, a wealth manager, and James Davidson, whose line of work remains unknown, had been charged with assault, and one with impaired driving.
The incident was apparently triggered by a request from the restaurant's staff to comply with the medical officer's mandate to wear masks:
That night at Pizza Pizza, Woyat stood at the counter wearing a mask. But Davidson clutched one in his hand or wore it uselessly under his chin, his mouth exposed as he declared, “You’re Nazis. You guys are complete fucking morons. COVID is a joke. You guys are fucking brainwashed.”
He shouted: “Are you fucking Middle Eastern or where are you from?” And, “I’m worth $50 million, you’re worth zero.”
There have been other such incidents:
In Prince George, a Walmart customer refusing to wear a mask pummeled a store greeter to the ground, repeatedly punching his head into the floor.
In Nelson, a hotel employee suffered a heart attack after being spat on and screamed at by a customer refusing to wear a mask.
It appears that wealth can have deleterious effects. Wealth does not mean entitlement. It should mean noblesse oblige.
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