Posted on 07/25/2007 10:43:01 AM PDT by GMMAC
Don't get deafened by the noise - do something
By Christie Blatchford
Toronto Globe and Mail
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 – Page A16
In the CTV News footage taken from the Saturday night - early Sunday morning, actually - that Ephraim Brown was killed, there is one particularly significant bit.
In several frames, six or seven tiny children, who look to be between 4 and 8, are walking down a darkened street. There are enough of them that they take up almost the entire road. They hold hands, and are being led to the safety of a city bus by uniformed Toronto police officers. At one end of the row of youngsters is a young mother carrying a baby.
Like Ephraim, the 11-year-old victim of a gun battle that broke out among rival gangsters, the children were at or in the vicinity of what began as a double birthday party and ended in blood.
If the world continues to unfold as it does now at Jane Street and Sheppard Avenue West, but also at a half-dozen other notorious intersections in Toronto and in most other major Canadian cities and some smaller ones too, the odds are grimly good that one of those gorgeous kids will grow up to be a gangster with a gun, another one or two will be victims of gunplay, and a couple of those little girls will be teenage mothers, to a couple of youngsters by different men who are drive-by fathers.
Yet there is so much noise, in the wake of Ephraim's slaying, that the temptation is to give up, do nothing, or in the more modern manner, parrot some of the noise and do nothing. The trick, rather, is to do a little and pray others do the same.
Certain shootings follow a pattern now familiar to all Torontonians.
These invariably involve a particularly vulnerable person who is injured or wounded (little Tamara Carter, shot while riding a bus; four-year-old Shaquan Cadougan, hit during a drive-by shooting) or an innocent person who is killed in a particularly brazen manner (Jane Creba, killed on Yonge Street in the middle of shopping the Boxing Day sales; Jordan Manners, fatally shot in the hallway of his high school).
A great hue and cry goes up. The Toronto police chief appears at a press conference. Weeping relatives of the dead plead for witnesses to come forward and the violence to end. The Toronto mayor reiterates his call for a complete handgun ban, which in turn prompts the same predictable responses in Ottawa.
Various advocates for various agendas (gun control, root causes, more community policing, tougher courts, longer sentences, whole families, tougher schools, marginalization of whatever group the shooters call home, racist police) push these agendas with varying degrees of success.
Talk shows, television and radio, interview the advocates, often called experts, and watch as their switchboards light up and websites overload.
Almost no one actually says anything. Each shooting is decried, in its way, as the most awful one, which will surely see a change, and yet almost nothing appears to change because sure as night follows day, there's another shooting around the corner.
As with the education and health-care systems, the problems that emerge at such times appear so enormous as to be unfixable; they aren't, but it is easy to see them as part of some impenetrable mass.
There are distinct and different issues.
Broken or dysfunctional families are a part of it, and these aren't confined to black families or Jamaican families or even Toronto families.
When I covered the recent trial of a girl, now 13, who was this month convicted in the murders of her little brother and their parents - this in the nice small city, population about 55,000, of Medicine Hat and its rural environs - most of the witnesses were teens or young people. Virtually all of them were white. In their evidence, asked where they lived, they would reply, "With my mom" or "With my dad" or "With my mother and her boyfriend."
Among them, none older than 25 and as young as 13, were cutters, binge drinkers, school dropouts, the chronically unemployed, drug dealers, petty criminals and several who appeared to my admittedly unskilled eye to be fetal alcohol syndrome youngsters. They were as disaffected, as troubled, as sad and as potentially dangerous as any of their counterparts in any of Toronto's social housing projects or black-dominated gangs.
These are all high-risk children, as Toronto police Detective Peter Duncan, who is with the 31 Division street crime unit and involved in area schools (Jordan Manners's was one) and gangs, calls them. They tend to follow the patterns of parents who lack certain basic skills, chief among them, how to parent.
Det. Duncan, who lectures frequently on how to spot these youngsters and is in the throes of writing a sort of how-to-help book, has hardly lost hope, though he is as sick as anyone of all the noise.
"There are so many elements," he says, "that what a lot of people do is convolute things by looking at it en masse. ... The thing to remember is that everyone doesn't have to fix everything."
In his lectures, he often talks about great disasters - the sinking of the Titanic, for instance - and breaks down the multiple small failures that made for the big one, the message that "No one has to fix everything."
I know a radio guy who, on his own time, is involved in a job-finding program for young people in one of Toronto's toughest areas, Jane Street and Finch Avenue. There are good police officers like Peter Duncan, doing what they can now and always thinking about how to do it better. There are teachers and principals who try to fill the gap left by missing fathers or busy or irresponsible mothers.
There are bursaries that accept contributions from those who want to give money not time, and that are awarded to young people who have demonstrated they're serious about learning and who are responsible enough to pay for part of their own schooling.
There are good community workers and leaders.
I fear people are in danger of being overwhelmed by the sheer size of the mess we collectively have made of things, and deafened by the noise. That line of little kids, holding hands, being led to safety by responsible adults, is what's at stake.
cblatchford@globeandmail.com
-
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.