Archive for the The Chairman’s Corner Category

The past week has been a harrowing one for everyone in North America, and obviously more so for our neighbours to the South.  Two separate and undeniably unnecessary killings of Black men by US law enforcement one day apart and the appalling retaliatory attack by a Black army veteran upon Dallas police officers that left five officers dead have exposed once again the vastness of the continuing racial divide among the world’s most prosperous and well-armed populace.

There is of course no shortage of commentators in Canada who have angrily and fairly dismissed the notion that Canadians can regard this inflection point in civil society as merely an American phenomenon.  The continuing racial biases evident in the practice of carding in my home city of Toronto and the demonstrably callous treatment of crimes against our indigenous populations throughout the country are more than sufficient evidence of our own shortcomings in our policing practices and our systemic inclinations.  American history may be more infamous for its race-based injustices, but no society has fully addressed the remnants of our less enlightened traditions.

That being said, there are aspects of the contemporary American experience with these social issues that are uniquely problematic.  The festering racial tensions between police and marginalized communities become far more dangerous in the context of concealed carry laws that turn even routine traffic stops or misdemeanor encounters into potentially deadly interactions.  It is more than a coincidence that both Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, the victims of the police shootings in Baton Rouge and St. Paul, respectively, were carrying concealed weapons in accordance with the laws of Louisiana and Minnesota.  That is not to blame the victims, who no one has suggested did anything to manifest a threat to the police officers that they encountered, but only to point out the fraught context in which Americans must work out the lingering symptoms of racial discord.

Similarly, the Dallas police force did not find itself confronted by an angry and arguably mentally ill young Black man brandishing a knife, but one carrying an AR-15, a weapon that demonstrated very devastatingly its ability to generate mass casualties.  In the US, even the outlet of healthy or even angry protest is compromised by the reality of a heavily armed population on both sides of the racial divide.

Despite the understandable anger and not infrequently intemperate excesses, the dialogue around race issues in North American society today is a healthy and inevitable precursor to change.  These sorts of revolutionary times are, however, unduly dangerous where they take place in a society that has a pathological yet constitutional belief in the wisdom of gun ownership as both a source of individual protection and means for promoting social progress.  Conflict has been and always will be the catalyst to social progress and, among the increasingly heterogeneous communities in our cities and nations is bound to become even more frequent.  If it is truly fundamental to the unity of the US that the revolutionary means as well as spirit of the American Founding Fathers be forever honoured, let the laws of the land put a flintlock musket in the hands of every citizen.  At least they are hard to conceal and even harder to aim and reload.

I had planned to write on a completely different topic this month. It was reasonably current, and in the context of the day when it first crossed my mind, seemed arguably important. I will probably come back to it next month, or maybe the month after, and by then it might be a little less topical, but I suspect it will seem more important than it would today. There can be no doubt that the senseless slaughter of 49 people and the life-altering wounding of 53 others is the worst kind of elephant in the room.

Less than 72 hours after the tragic events in Orlando, the narrative is already shifting moment by moment as both heartfelt advocates and political opportunists try to claim the massacre as the cri du coeur for their particular cause. Like virtually every other mass shooting, the motivations and contributing factors in this incident have enough ambiguity to support the demonization of almost any modern social or cultural failing. Islamic terrorism? The shooter made 9-1-1 calls suggesting that he was acting in the name of ISIS. But then again, only a few years earlier, he had informed co-workers of his allegiance to both Shia-led Hezbollah and its sworn Sunni enemy ISIS. If he was truly Jihad inspired, he was at best a poorly-informed adherent. Mental health system failures? His first wife alludes to bipolar disorder. Homophobia? It would be impossible to believe that the location for the rampage was selected randomly. But even here, the easy trope initially provided by his father of a derangement prompted when the shooter and his young son witnessed two men kissing is being insidiously displaced as evidence emerges of a history of frequenting Pulse Nightclub beyond what one would expect of one casing the club for an attack. Gun control failings? The AK-15 used in the attack is a weapon that no one can make a reasonable argument has any relevance to use for personal protection, sport or hunting, and can be acquired in Florida from any gun dealer without any waiting period.

With all of this available fodder, the debate will now swirl around WHICH cause can rightfully claim this tragedy. Would tighter gun control laws have prevented or at least reduced the body count resulting from this tragedy? Critics will point out the availability of kettle bombs and other homemade instruments of mass slaughter that could have been employed by one so inclined. Are the staunchly heterosexual normative views of Islam (and Catholicism and most fundamental branches of Christianity, for that matter) really the issue here if the attack was borne more of self-loathing than of a culturally-supported xenophobia? Would obligatory reporting and treatment of individuals exhibiting symptoms of mental health issues make us safer, or drive affected individuals to distance themselves from others who could possible lead them to voluntary treatment? Do tighter immigration policies to exclude immigration from Islamic nations have any real relevance to a crime committed by a US-born son of immigrant parents?

There will never be agreement on how this or any other attack like this could have been prevented, and it is probably true that we will never rid the world of these unthinkable tragedies. However, it is a second order failure of our humanity if we fail to acknowledge the following truths that are so apparent in the context of the Orlando carnage:

1. That our families, faith groups and broader communities must redouble our efforts to eradicate any stigma around the LGBTQ community lest we provide even a hint of social license for the acts of those inclined by malice or illness toward either antipathy to such groups or a catastrophic self-loathing;
2. That our society must remove any stigma to those seeking help with mental health challenges; and
3. That the right of private citizens to bear arms must not extend to weapons that have a disproportionate suitability to offensive applications than to any personal protection, hunting or sporting requirements.

The world will never be without troubled minds, and some of those troubled minds will inevitably be inclined toward violence. The best we can do and the least we must do is to provide no easy targets or readily accessible means of inflicting mass harm.

For our earliest ancestors, the world had to have been a bewildering and dangerous place.  Of all of the awe- and fear-inspiring phenomenon that they witnessed, there must have been few that exceeded the fiery maelstrom that followed a lightning strike upon a tinder dry African savannah.  The majesty of the seemingly random violence of this natural force would have been both frightening and exhilarating to our primitive forbearers.

As we know, our ancestors’ natural awe and fear were in time overcome by ingenuity, and flints replaced lightning in fire pits lined with rock to contain this seemingly magical force.  The transformation of the arc of our species was dramatic.  A broad range of foods were rendered palatable and digestible through cooking with fire.  Tools of industry and weapons of conquest were forged in flame from iron and later steel.  Through fire, water was turned to steam to power locomotion before further refinement of the technology gave way to the internal combustion engine and ultimately to the power of flight.  The first and most important mastery of nature that lifted homo sapiens above its fellow species was unquestionably that of fire.

Of course, the ability to harness the heat of fire was also instrumental to expanding the extent of settlement by our ancestors.  Areas with minimum temperatures too low to support the naked ape became accessible with the heat of the hearth.  And so we came upon the boreal pine forest.  Once again, our ancestors were both witnesses to and threatened by the natural phenomenon of wildfire.  However, by that time, our understanding of the phenomenon was more nuanced.  We had learned that these fires were random in timing and location, but not in purpose.  In fact, the seeds of new life for the pine forest were contained in the cones produced by the Jack pine that flourish there, which can only be freed from their entombment and seated into the soil by fire.

Periodic wildfire, we realized, was the critical factor in natural forest renewal, but an existential threat to frontier settlement.  Our mastery of fire included mastery of fire suppression, and the frequent necessary small fires that created new growth forests and natural firebreaks were sacrificed to the security of settlement and development.  Once again, the advancement of the species prevailed in the taming of nature.

On October 3, 2003, Roy Horn of the animal act duo Siegfried & Roy was bitten on the neck by a 7-year old tiger named Montecore.  Horn had placed his head inside of Montecore’s jaws many times before, as he had with many more tigers in his by-then 36 year career in Las Vegas.  Miraculously and fortunately, Horn was not killed but was severely injured.  Like Roy Horn, Fort McMurray, Alberta, long situate in the jaws of the tiger, was this week tragically reminded that the beast is never completely tamed.