blogcutter | Entries tagged with violence

Forty years ago today, John Lennon was shot outside his New York City apartment building. He died soon afterwards. Here's a news item from ABC, which will be televising a special on Sunday:

https://abc7ny.com/john-lennon-murder-eyewitness-news-the-dakota/8229799/

A decade or so earlier, he had prophetically sung "The way things are going, they're going to crucify me." Some radio stations bleeped out the word "Christ" because used in this way, it's a naughty word, don't you know?

Over the past few decades, we've increasingly moved towards a more secular society. It's a funny thing, though. Whereas in my young day, daily Bible readings and religious instruction were part of my school life regardless of our personal or family beliefs (this was in the "public" school board, i.e. not the Roman Catholic one, even though both were in fact publicly funded), nowadays we have Quebec's Bill 21 which forbids any outward sign that some people may not self-identify as part of the homogeneous secular crowd.

And then there's another Lennon/Ono classic. The Woman is the N-Word of the World? Doesn't have quite the same power when you put it that way, does it? Whatever happened to literary and artistic licence, anyway?

I wish I could truly believe that the pen was mightier than the sword - or the gun or the van - but I'm not sure that I do. There's still a lot of violence occurring in the world and we can go around holding memorials and saying "Lest we forget." But even if people remember us when we're gone, we mere mortals can't just rise up from the dead and save the world, at least in my belief system.

C-word, you know it ain't easy...

Current Mood: sad
Current Location: home
Current Music: Some Time in NYC

I recently wrote about the Amber Alert system, arguing that while children certainly deserve to live in a safe environment, there has got to be a better way of accomplishing this. But while children may indeed be at risk of being harmed by the significant adults in their lives, sometimes it's a two-way street. School-aged kids are more violent than they were a decade or two ago, to the point that some teachers and other school staff are resorting to Kevlar vests and shin-guards to protect themselves!

How did it all come to this? Is society going to hell in a hand basket? Is it the fault of liberalized divorce laws, "illegitimate" kids and "broken homes"? Should we bring back dress codes and detentions? What about The Strap, The Ruler, and all the other torturous weapons of corporal punishment of yesteryear?

There are no easy answers. But I think a lot of the problem is that we have moved from an isolationist or segregationist model to an integrationist one. Neither is good or bad in itself - it's just that it's unrealistic to suppose we can have a one-size-fits-all model under which all kids can thrive.

Here's how the segregated model worked. When I was at school in the 1960s, it was the era of the Cold War and the "space race". There was an "accelerated" program whereby kids completed grades one through four in three years and it seems to me at least half the kids in our school were doing that. There were also a few decelerated, remedial or "opportunity" classes for those who were progressing more slowly. Then there were "enrichment" or "gifted" programs in subsequent grades and for grades seven and eight (in some schools, grades six through eight), we rotated classes through the day with subject teachers and home-room teachers and for these grades students were "streamed" into A-stream, B-stream or C-stream classes. High school was a little different again and we actually got to pick from a few options (though there were rather more compulsory courses in those days than there are now). There was an accelerated program here too, although it wasn't as prevalent as the ones at the elementary level.

And that was just the kids who were basically "normal" as we would have said in those days. If you were physically, mentally or behaviourally aberrant in some way, you likely wouldn't attend a regular public school at all - you would go to some sort of special school, either as a day-student commuting from your own home or in some kind of a residential setting. Anyway, the point I'm making is that the old system grouped together those kids who were expected to progress through the curriculum at a similar rate for whatever reason: past achievements, scores on standardized tests, diligence or even just the capacity to sit in a classroom and obey the teacher's instructions.

To be sure, there was probably some damage done by labelling and categorizing some kids at too early an age, or making unwarranted assumptions about them or being oblivious to their particular learning style.

But now we have a kind of integrational mania. We seem to have this notion that every child should enter a particular grade at a particular age. In Ontario at least, it seems few kids are being held either held back a grade or bumped up a grade, regardless of whether they have mastered their grade-level material. Even kids who have highly intensive educational, intellectual and emotional needs are being integrated into regular classrooms. It puts a huge strain on the teachers, aides, social workers and other school staff, not to mention the majority of other students - the fairly-neurotypical-kids of taxpaying parents who surely are just as deserving of an effective and stimulating educational environment. And that's before we even get into the financial considerations, whether they are borne privately by individual families or collectively by the system as a whole.

I'd like to think we live in a more enlightened age. And I do certainly see the value of kids retaining strong ties to their families and their communities. On the other hand, we shouldn't toss out what was good about the "good old days". We should preserve a range of options within our educational system. Because kids are not all the same.

Current Mood: worried
Current Location: home campus
Current Music: school daze

Before we leave March and International Women's Day too far behind us, I want to take some time to briefly revisit the progress women have (and haven't) made toward full equality. Two trials currently in the news have been a particular source of concern to me.

The first one is the trial of police officer Daniel Montsion, who is being tried in connection with the death of Abdirahman Abdi. Montsion's actions have been portrayed in the court of public opinion as a shocking example of police brutality and institutionalized racism and racial profiling, not to mention discrimination against the mentally ill. "Justice for Abdi!" the protesters proclaim. But what about justice for the six or seven women - and that's just the ones who've been brave enough to speak up - who were sexually assaulted by Abdi before he was restrained by police?

Apparently Abdi managed to grope or otherwise inappropriately touch six women in a Bridgehead coffee shop before the police swooped in and did their thing. In addition, a woman in her car who was stopped at a red light in the area was also victimized by Abdi, who reached into her car window on that fateful hot July day. I suspect there may well be other victims out there who didn't step forward, who just wanted to put the unpleasantness behind them, rather than reliving it all in court and being accused of somehow "asking for it"!

Now, it may well be that Abdi could not realistically be held responsible for his own actions - but if that was the case, then who and where were his "minders"? Should he not perhaps have been locked up somewhere, or put on more or different medication, or been otherwise cared for, both for his own safety and security and that of his family, friends and the public at large? I'm not normally a particularly fervent advocate for the police but it does seem to me that they lack the necessary resources to deal with situations such as that one.

The second trial now unfolding is that of Joshua Boyle, who has pled "not guilty" to 19 charges of assorted violent behaviour, most of it towards his estranged wife, Caitlan Coleman. We don't know who the second victim is because there's still a publication ban, but I certainly hope it's not one of his kids, all of whom are very young (and scarily, Boyle has said he always knew he wanted a large family). In this case, I don't think there's any doubt that Boyle was fully responsible for his own actions and I hope they throw the book at him and lock him up for a very, very long time.

In other news, there have been serious allegations of sexual abuse at Ottawa Community Housing. More broadly, managers of women's shelters have pointed out the dangers of social media and smartphones - apparently aggrieved ex-partners can easily track these women, and who knows where that may lead - will we see more Basil Borutskis and Russell Williamses in our midst?

I'm not in favour of the death penalty. So I think the most pressing question here would be: How can we rehabilitate these violent people (usually men), if indeed they CAN be rehabilitated? It's all very well to talk of sensitivity training and anger management classes, but the folks taking the training may be pretty adept at giving the answers and making the noises the teacher wants to hear, regardless of what their true feelings and beliefs may be. Moreover, they may simply not show up for the required training (as was apparently the case with Borutski) and there are no consequences whatsoever!

Societal attitudes clearly need to change - but that tends to be a longer-term thing. Meanwhile, we may need to stop the violence using more direct intervention. How do we achieve that balance between reactive and proactive measures?

Current Mood: enraged

Wednesday mornings, as I may have mentioned before, are generally my errand mornings. I have an early-morning meeting downtown and then look after things like banking, shopping, getting my watch battery replaced... and so on. Quite often, I walk along the Sparks Street mall as far as Elgin, then cross through Confederation Square to the Rideau Centre. Yesterday, however, I wanted to go to the public library, which doesn't open till 10 AM. So once I'd stopped at a bank machine and gone to the drugstore for a few things, there was still a bit of time to kill before opening time. I decided to go to the Second Cup at Slater and Metcalfe for a coffee and a chance to look at my Metro paper and do the Sudoku and crossword puzzles.

By the time I'd done that, it was around 10:10 or so. Crossing Metcalfe, I missed one walk signal because of the police cars zooming through the red light, sirens blaring. But I didn't really think anything of it. Downtown Ottawa is often like that on a weekday morning. Anyway, I went into the library without incident after that, browsed for perhaps forty minutes, checked out three books, and was at my bus-stop at Albert and Metcalfe, ready to head home, by 11AM. I wanted to be home by noon, as I was expecting a delivery then.

I made it, too. I was a bit surprised at the welcome I got when I walked through the door just after 11:30. "You just missed it," I was told. Had my delivery arrived early?

I had heard nothing about the incident at the War Memorial and Parliament Hill nor the rumoured incident that had the Rideau Centre in lockdown. The buses - mine, anyway - were still following their regular route at that point and the library had seemed to be carrying on with its normal routines. But I was soon to find out. It was yet another instance of being in the wrong place at the right time.

Interestingly enough, despite Harper's whole "tough on crime" agenda, there has been no talk of imposing the War Measures Act this time around. Even though we're probably more at war today, with our ISIL-fighting troops, than we were in 1970. Would it be unconstitutional this time around, now that we have our Charter of Rights and Freedoms? Or maybe all the antiterrorism legislation implemented since 9/11 - regardless of whether it has built-in sunset clauses - has simply made that sort of thing unnecessary because the new legislation is far more draconian than the War Measures Act ever was?

Meanwhile, I just learned that Daniel J. Levitin has apparently cancelled his appearance tomorrow at the Writers' Festival as a result of the incident. Of course, Montreal has always been rather twitchier about these things than Ottawa. I don't think they ever got over their FLQ crisis, the bombs in mailboxes, the protests at St-Jean Baptiste Day parades, or even, perhaps, their fires at cinemas that for the longest time had them barring children under twelve (or was it ten?) altogether. To this day, I NEVER see on-street boxes for newspapers, whether the freebie ones or the regular papers like Le Devoir or the Gazette. They DO still have mailboxes... but it will certainly be interesting to see what happens after door-to-door delivery ceases and they need those community mail boxes on every corner! Even in Ottawa, those red mailboxes (where you post your letters, not where you pick them up) were preventatively removed from downtown street corners during at least one of the major international meetings (I think a G8 Summit) held here.

Of course, the obvious question to ask would be, "What precisely SHOULD we do?" And I'm afraid at the moment, my answer is, "I wish I knew." There's definitely a risk that the government will implement all kinds of intrusive screening procedures that if anything, lull us into a false sense of security or willingness to surrender our rights, freedoms, privacy and democratic principles, while doing nothing to track down or deter actual or would-be terrorists and preserve our personal safety and national security.

Current Mood: anxious
Current Location: an undisclosed one
Current Music: American Pie