Quote:
Originally Posted by Riverman
Etobicoke and Scarlem are not in Toronto sir. And J&F is a very small area easily avoided. I'm talking about the city proper.
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Not to provoke an argument but yes, actually Etobicoke and Scarborough are in Toronto "city proper". At one time , no , they weren't but since then they've amalgated into a new mega-city. Technically they're just neighbourhoods now.
Anyway , let me point out that the people of the North End don't come in just one colour nor were they necessarily born a thousand or more miles away. And yes, for those who don't realize it, money by itself does not a person make. Generally speaking , people aren't criminals because they're poor , they're poor because they're criminals. That means that just because someone may not have much money , it's rather ignorant to presume they have an exposed criminal element to their behaviour. Most people (yes , this even applies in the crappiest part of the North End) are NOT criminals. Certainly the North End harbours more than its fair share but for as much as we may not want to venture into the area if given the choice , it's unfair to assume everybody in the are wants to beat and rob you.
Solutions ?
Okay , while I don't really want to turn this into some sort of Right wing /Left wing argument , the last people to have a crack at fixing society's ills would generally be categorized as left-wing. Their goal was noble but to most people it was obvious from the start that most of the hug-a-thug methods were doomed to failure from the start.
Take heart though lefties....nobody is saying that the right-wingers had any better ideas. I'm pretty sure that locking people up forever has never had the intended effect either and we tried that for centuries. Besides , I think we can all agree that most people who commit a crime aren't beyond redemption in the eyes of society.
That touches on the issue I pointed out in my last post though : You can't fix the North End without fixing society as a whole. We could raze the whole North End and redevelop it entirely and all we've really done is force the problematic demographic to take up residence in some other neighbourhood. They've got to live somewhere after all.
.........aaaaaaand this is where we start having to talk about government social policy and initiative.
We could give everybody in the North End all the money they'd ever need to live a very comfortable life and we all already know that nothing would really change. So we can try to educate as many people as we can instead. The problem with that is that education is already on the menu and we can't force anybody to learn if they don't want to.
In the last couple of decades we've heard terms like "openness" , "tolerance" , "understanding" thrown around as though they in any way address anything by themselves. Great...okay , we understand , tolerate , and are very open. Now what ?
What we should have been doing the whole time is making a point of "inviting" people to take part in their communities as productive members. It's all very adversarial right now so even if one "side" drops its guard , that doesn't make the other "side" feel obligated to reciprocate. A lot of people with these ideas of "tolerance" and "open-ness" fail to remember that most people really just don't give a crap. They aren't interested in waxing poetic about community and culture and all that. It's just not on their radar. They don't sit around trying to think of new ways to make the world a better place...they just want to get by as best they can. Convincing a gangbanger to appreciate law , order , and a peaceful society is a futile effort until he or she gets old enough to understand the benefits of these things. Forced responsibility is what it comes down to most of the time (For example , once somebody has a kid , they tend to come around to why safe streets are important)
There simply is no single solution or , for that matter , any practical number of them. Individuals have to grow at their own pace and since that's the case , we can think of the worst part of the North End as a sort of staging ground of life. It's the bottom and anybody can go there. When they decide they've had enough , they'll participate with society in a beneficial way. The door is always open for this but we can't force anybody to walk through it. As long as that door remains open , the problem , at least , won't get any worse (which , in spite of what some people think , is not getting worse) Thus , to me it makes a lot more sense to "invite" people to participate in productive ways by showing them the benefits of such a lifestyle. Right now , we have to wait for them to grow up and some people simply don't , nor are they interested in ever doing so.