The Better Life

This Thursday past, in the neighbourhood I used to live up until early last year, outside the grocery store where I used to shop, a forty-seven-year-old father of two lost his life as he was caught in the crossfire of what is believed to be a shootout between rival gang members. This came on the heels of a forty-two-year-old man losing his life after two men fired upon a crowd of people after being ejected from a downtown strip club.

I saw the photograph of the gentleman killed outside the grocery store and wondered if, perchance, I had seen him during the numerous times I shopped there and walked past. Here was a man, a father, traveling thousands of miles over water and land to the "land of opportunity", as we know it, to provide a better life for his eighteen-year-old daughter and twenty-three-year-old son, only to have his snuffed out by someone presumably trying to do the same for himself. While I was living in the neighbourhood, the gentleman who ran the little convenience shop around the corner from us, another Chinese immigrant, was slashed in his face late one night. Fortunately, he was able to recover - he returned to his post the next day, as a matter of fact - but it makes one wonder: here is a man with a Ph. D. in Chemistry coming to Canada in hopes of a better life, only to work round-the-clock in perpetual mortal danger in the underbelly of Toronto.

As for the other gentleman, countless times have I treaded over the spot of cold, hard concrete on which he died; not one of those times did I wonder if some unruly customer brandishing a pistol would be thrown out of the club into my path, but here we are. This man was also a father; now, his life is no more, for a couple of young men thought to right a perceived wrong through lethal means.

I can't say I'm at all surprised at the outrage expressed by members of the public in the wake of these shootings. It's easy to lash out at these perpetrators and demand their heads on a row of pikes. Here is one such reaction:

""When people start pulling this stuff in broad daylight without any regard for citizens because they don't care, because they know they're going to get a slap on the wrist...that's the problem".

An interesting choice of words, to say the least, though who am I to comment, having not lost a loved one in such a senseless manner? How can I say my reaction would not be vitriolic? Nonetheless, I must say this: it may come as a shock to many of you, but murderers are often branded as "heroes". Had this been a battlefield in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Haïti, or Sudan, or Somalia, or Colombia, or any other territory whose resources we seek to conquer, the assailants would be commended for their bravery and patriotism, while the likes of Messrs. Hou Chang Mao and John O'Keefe graced with the moniker "collateral damage".

Yes, these events have everything to do with the wars in which we engage. I don't bring this up for the sake of climbing atop my Lefty soap box: I do it because the theme underlying murder at home and warfare abroad is the belief that violence will solve our problems, right our wrongs. When Presidents and Prime Ministers decry the need to murder people before they murder us, we nod our heads in agreement, and who can blame us? We don't want that shit pipe to backwash into our backyard. But when it does, we fail to see it for what it is: the same length of pipe connecting the shit over there to the shit here.

The taking of lives, no matter by whose hand, no matter by whose order, still reeks of the same decay. If we want this to stop, we best ask ourselves the right questions before attempting to answer them.