Lessons From Yonge Street
The peaceful pursuit of shopping pleasure was shattered yesterday when reportedly 15 to 20 young Toronto males engaged in a gunfight in downtown Toronto. Predictably, these fools being such bad shots, only innocent bystanders suffered injuries including the death of a teenage girl.
In the immediate aftermath of incidents such as this, politicians should have the good sense to say nothing more than an expression of their heartfelt sympathy for the innocent victims and their families. To the extent the politician has some control over the delivery of necessary state controlled services to those same victims, he should ensure they are provided expeditiously and generously.
Too often the politician uses such an event as a soapbox from which to deliver a political statement. Sadly, such was the case today, in particular when Mr. Martin spoke. He said among other things that like the earlier strings of shooting deaths in Toronto, this latest one "demonstrates the consequences of exclusion" in our society. I have written on this previously, and I continue to find it astonishingly vapid for the Prime Minister of this country to attribute gang violence (does anyone doubt that this was anything else?) to Canadian society's failure to be inclusive enough to the members of these gangs. Stephen Harper had the good sense to say nothing other than to repeat that, from a protection of the public standpoint, there are already adequate enough laws governing the use of guns, but they need to be enforced.
Today's National Post features a front page story quoting at length a Toronto based rapper who goes by the stage name of Kardinal. He said: “If you look at society in general, everything is breaking down,” Jason Harrow said over the phone. “Simple things, like TV shows — certain language used to be ava i l a b l e only after 9 o’clock, now you c a n hear it in the middle of the day. Raunchy sex is on TV, content of TV shows is just crazy 24 hours a day. Music — you can have a song, I mean, something stupid like Cisco’s Thong Song or [the Black-Eyed Peas’] My Humps or whatever — you just have all this crazy material that’s on 24 hours a day.
“I think the values and morals and standards that we have as a society are just going down, period. When the standards keep going down and more and more things become the norm, eventually we lose track of values and morals and eventually it just becomes a state of chaos where anything goes.”
Kardinal goes on to talk about the absence of male role models in many of the homes of the perpetrators of these crimes. It is uncommonly sound reasoning espoused by this young Jamaican immigrant. Gun controls and filling our jails aren't the solution he says. Using his own life as an example he favours more intervention in the form of increased programs to assist young people in these high risk circumstances to get training or even to engage in activities that will take them out of the sex, drugs and MTV rut they fall into when parents, particularly fathers absent themselves from the lives of their children.
It is a reflection of our society that it takes a rapper to raise the issue of the consequences of the collapse of moral standards. Morality can't be legislated. Citizens of a nation need to establish their own moral code. Canadians have become smug. We have abandoned the goals of peace, order and good government for the goal of protecting the "rights" of every individual to determine for oneself what is best for oneself. Those rights have been extended to the right to participate in or be entertained by group sex in a club specifically designed for such purpose; the right to have an abortion even if almost to full term and even as a 14 year old without parental knowledge or consent; the right to exhibit works depicting the desecration of religious objects or the abuse of children under the pretext of artistic expression; the right to force a publisher to publish material offensive to his faith and his sense of what is morally acceptable. The concept of "community standards" has died with the death of true community. In its place has risen the Frankenstein of extreme individuality.
Our Prime Minister not only appears ignorant of how much our country has changed for the worse in the last 22 years of uninterrupted Liberal rule, but he actively seeks to further promote the role of government to further expand and protect these "rights" no matter how abhorrent they may be to many, if not most Canadians.
Mr. Martin, like most politicians, has failed to grasp the single most important underlying cause of Canada's slow slide into chaos, yet the rapper Kardinal sees it as plain as day.
Every act of crime exposes the fallen nature of the human race. All the "root cause" debates that focus on poverty, or education or exclusion miss the mark. Fundamentally, government should first establish and maintain a rule of law that clearly defines criminal behaviour and then enforce reasonable and just sanctions against those who break the law. That is the best it can do. Once it tries to do more government merely makes the problem worse, giving its people false hopes that matters which only they can solve in the deepest recesses of their souls can be solved by government.
In the immediate aftermath of incidents such as this, politicians should have the good sense to say nothing more than an expression of their heartfelt sympathy for the innocent victims and their families. To the extent the politician has some control over the delivery of necessary state controlled services to those same victims, he should ensure they are provided expeditiously and generously.
Too often the politician uses such an event as a soapbox from which to deliver a political statement. Sadly, such was the case today, in particular when Mr. Martin spoke. He said among other things that like the earlier strings of shooting deaths in Toronto, this latest one "demonstrates the consequences of exclusion" in our society. I have written on this previously, and I continue to find it astonishingly vapid for the Prime Minister of this country to attribute gang violence (does anyone doubt that this was anything else?) to Canadian society's failure to be inclusive enough to the members of these gangs. Stephen Harper had the good sense to say nothing other than to repeat that, from a protection of the public standpoint, there are already adequate enough laws governing the use of guns, but they need to be enforced.
Today's National Post features a front page story quoting at length a Toronto based rapper who goes by the stage name of Kardinal. He said: “If you look at society in general, everything is breaking down,” Jason Harrow said over the phone. “Simple things, like TV shows — certain language used to be ava i l a b l e only after 9 o’clock, now you c a n hear it in the middle of the day. Raunchy sex is on TV, content of TV shows is just crazy 24 hours a day. Music — you can have a song, I mean, something stupid like Cisco’s Thong Song or [the Black-Eyed Peas’] My Humps or whatever — you just have all this crazy material that’s on 24 hours a day.
“I think the values and morals and standards that we have as a society are just going down, period. When the standards keep going down and more and more things become the norm, eventually we lose track of values and morals and eventually it just becomes a state of chaos where anything goes.”
Kardinal goes on to talk about the absence of male role models in many of the homes of the perpetrators of these crimes. It is uncommonly sound reasoning espoused by this young Jamaican immigrant. Gun controls and filling our jails aren't the solution he says. Using his own life as an example he favours more intervention in the form of increased programs to assist young people in these high risk circumstances to get training or even to engage in activities that will take them out of the sex, drugs and MTV rut they fall into when parents, particularly fathers absent themselves from the lives of their children.
It is a reflection of our society that it takes a rapper to raise the issue of the consequences of the collapse of moral standards. Morality can't be legislated. Citizens of a nation need to establish their own moral code. Canadians have become smug. We have abandoned the goals of peace, order and good government for the goal of protecting the "rights" of every individual to determine for oneself what is best for oneself. Those rights have been extended to the right to participate in or be entertained by group sex in a club specifically designed for such purpose; the right to have an abortion even if almost to full term and even as a 14 year old without parental knowledge or consent; the right to exhibit works depicting the desecration of religious objects or the abuse of children under the pretext of artistic expression; the right to force a publisher to publish material offensive to his faith and his sense of what is morally acceptable. The concept of "community standards" has died with the death of true community. In its place has risen the Frankenstein of extreme individuality.
Our Prime Minister not only appears ignorant of how much our country has changed for the worse in the last 22 years of uninterrupted Liberal rule, but he actively seeks to further promote the role of government to further expand and protect these "rights" no matter how abhorrent they may be to many, if not most Canadians.
Mr. Martin, like most politicians, has failed to grasp the single most important underlying cause of Canada's slow slide into chaos, yet the rapper Kardinal sees it as plain as day.
Every act of crime exposes the fallen nature of the human race. All the "root cause" debates that focus on poverty, or education or exclusion miss the mark. Fundamentally, government should first establish and maintain a rule of law that clearly defines criminal behaviour and then enforce reasonable and just sanctions against those who break the law. That is the best it can do. Once it tries to do more government merely makes the problem worse, giving its people false hopes that matters which only they can solve in the deepest recesses of their souls can be solved by government.
posted by Ben Buan | 2:19 p.m.
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