Men without war

I came to Toronto 9 years ago because it seemed to me a city of bright hope, an Emerald City to which my own winding yellow brick road had delivered me. I needed to see the wizard. I needed a new heart, a new brain, some courage. I found it, over the rainbow where many dreams really do come true. I was one of many. We're mostly immigrants here, even if only from the small towns of the Canadian hinterland, and we've all come chasing dreams.

But today the rainbow dream is tarnished terribly. Today in the streets of Toronto the children of the rainbow dream shoot one another dead for nothing. For drugs, for pride, for glory, for turf, and increasingly, it seems to me, for fun.

After a couple of years now of shootings and stabbings lighting up the news every night, the thin wails of scattered families crying have finally been heard loudly all over town, and now no one is unaffected. The Toronto Star, to its eternal credit, made the violence our collective concern this past weekend, with horrifying images of the results of the violence and front-page coverage. It's about time, too. This is our city. These are our children, our families, our neighbourhoods. This, in a very real sense, is our Canada. And we need to do something about it now.

There are a lot of reasons for the violence, and I'm not smart enough to know what all of them are. But I have a theory I call "Men Without War." Basically, it goes like this: young men without war will make war, unless they've got something better to believe in and to apply themselves to. I've been reading about the 14th century, the so-called time of chivalry. The nobles of that time made constant war, against all reason or logic, and often on their own people. This probably has gone on since time immemorial. Even chimps go to war.

The men of my grandfather's generation had a good war to fight, and it defined their time. It gave them a cause. It gave them courage and made them part of something. They believed in it. Ask many of them today and they'll tell you their lives never had such meaning as when they shipped off to fight for the good cause.

What are today's young, urban and suburban men a part of? What do they believe in? What should they unite for? They don't need to fight the Nazi menace. They don't have a king to defend and they're certainly not about to fight for the constitution. They barely know their country, in many cases - recently a teacher in the inner city told me his students didn't know that Lake Ontario was a body of fresh water.

These kids are growing up in a collision of worlds, their parents', the one they see on TV, the Canada they've been vaguely informed about but never see, and the real-life world of their own streets, where for lack of a guiding principal and a meaning in their lives, they make their own meaning by making war on each other.

Poverty and racism play a part of course. Some of these young men think their world is hopeless and they figure they have nothing to lose. They figure they'll never play a part, and why would they want to, in the system that surrounds them and to a large extent defines their lives, a hateful juggernaut that builds shopping malls and high-rise buildings and ships junk food and inundates their minds with garbage.

They're not alone if they feel isolated and alienated and disconnected from the capitalist crap that we're drowning ourselves in. That feeling practically defines the twentieth century in many parts of the world. But in our time, in this country there is a horrible lack of vision that makes all these things seem worse. We're not fighting for anything anywhere as Canadians. We believe in things, sure, but passively. Our peacekeepers make a noble stand abroad, but on the home front we do nothing, for the most part. We pay our taxes, and gripe and grouse about the liars and self-promoters and greedy gargoyles who guard the ivory towers, and we hope we have time to duck before the shit that is piling up all over the world really hits the fan and spatters all over us.

This will not do. In the void where our purpose, our ideals, our active faith in something greater than ourselves should be, you can now hear the terrible echo of gunshots. This is what happens when you build a country and everyone comes, but then you don't work on it together. We can't just sit here living side by side hoping for the best. Violence among the youth is only the starkest example; homelessness and the desperate plight of many Native reserves are among many others.

Can't we give these kids a message? Can't we get together and actually talk about something that we ALL believe in, that young men with too much energy and not enough purpose can join in on? What are we building here, and what is it worth? I only hope all the useless sacrifice that's going on right now can somehow function as a reminder of how high the price of peace and prosperity really is.

Wake up Canada, before it's too late. Men without war are making war. I'm tired of hearing War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terrorism from south of the border and I know those terms become empty, fast. But if we don't declare a war on mediocrity, a war on apathy, a war on hopelessness, a war on violence, a war on the forces that conspire to destroy our environment, our health, and our future.... then the shootings in the streets will only be a taste of what's to come.

The solution is the same as it's ever been: vision, leadership, purpose, and hard work. If you don't see it at the top then at least start at the bottom. I refuse to believe the yellow brick road that brought us here leads to nowhere BUT here, where the wizard is nothing but a snake-oil salesman and a heart is nothing but a bag of sawdust.