Premature

Reading the CBC website's comment page in the wake of the Boxing Day shooting death of Jane Creba and the wounding of seven others in Toronto, you'd have thought the Big Smoke had turned into a warzone, a scene of racial strife that was playing out the last days of a dying city. In some of the letters, the thin veil of racism is almost completely ripped off, one J. Villa even going so far as to imply that black people are "devils". Several readers from New Brunswick and Red Deer, Alberta write in to comment on a city they don't even live in, armchair generals to the last.

As someone who was born in Toronto, and has lived in its suburbs and knows its urban core quite well, it amazes me that anyone could look at an incident like this and assume that Toronto was going to the dogs. As the same J. Villa on that page pointed out, in April 1994, Vivi Lemonis was killed during a robbery at a cafe called Just Desserts-- over 11 years ago (a little off of the 20 years guesstimated by Villa). The fact of the matter is that this kind of incident is a rarity -- that of a black man shooting a young, attractive, white women -- and it betrays the parochialism of a lot of people when they start making noise about immigrants, gun cultures and how a city is fast turning into a cesspit of violence and carnage, when such an incident occurs.

If you've ever lived in Toronto, or even in many American cities with per-capita murder rates an order or two larger than any Canadian city, you'd know that you can generally walk around feeling pretty safe and secure. These are not warzones, but like any large and dense population, there will be people with bad motives and loose ethics -- restricting immigration assumes that only foreign cultures can spread violence, when Columbine, the Michigan militias and Timothy McVeigh, as well as the thug-jock ethos of modern white culture manifestly demonstrate this is untrue.

The reality is, there are bad parts of cities, places where the poor and underprivileged live, where due to circumstance and lifestyle, bad things are more prone to happen. "Good people" don't go there. That's what we usually see on television and on the news, when there's a shooting in the black community, or in the Indian community, or in the South-East Asian community. In fact, not long ago in the suburbs of Toronto, a young, attractive, Indian woman was shot through a door by some men, also Indian. This added to people's belief that Toronto had gone gun-crazy, but beyond local mention, didn't even play across Canada. The only reason that this particular tragedy has garnered continuous national attention is because "good people" are getting hurt now -- good people being a euphemism for middle-class and white. As long as the violence stayed in bad areas, in Scarborough and the seedier parts of downtown, or the low-rent areas of South Etobicoke, it could be shrugged off as another news item, another bullet on the list of reasons why Toronto was no longer as good as it used to be. But Jane Creba, with her pretty, pleasingly blonde face, so white and innocent -- well, that's something to get worked up about.

The supposed insularity that breeds tension and dissension caused by multiculturalism isn't the problem -- even in the supposed melting pot of America, the black community is as separate from the Jewish community as it is separate from the white community and violence is more a component of the superstructure than any individual section of the country; at least in Canada, we recognize people's natural need to group and great effort is made in introducing each other to our respective cultures. As more rational minds have pointed out, time and again -- the effort has to be put in at the level of class: social programs, good schools, good urban planning and architecture, inclusion rather than isolation, if things are to really work. To blame the gun violence on cultural issues when the problem is completely social? That is inherently racist.