Tag: social comment

The Cause and Cure for the London Riots

It’s time to put on your big boots, folks.  As the riots in Britain die down, everybody and his friend is busy telling us what really caused them.  An awful lot of equine feces is being tossed about; you don’t want to step in any of it.  Even as I write this, journalists and politicos are rounding up the usual suspects and sentencing them — without trial.  Apparently, society was the big ring leader… again — and its lieutenants, poverty, unemployment and government cutbacks were also in on it.  Young people were the innocent victims … again, pushed to the breaking point of violence by their disadvantages, the police and some guy in Earl’s Court with a steady job.  It’s all quite simple.  Community organizers and activists have been telling us for years we need to give these people more money or something like this was bound to happen.  It’s kinda like paying Tony Soprano so his boys don’t come around after dark and burn down your store.  Extortion is such a hard word, so let’s just call it investing in the future.

For the last fifty years or so, society has been investing in the future under the quaint idea that disadvantaged people are somehow different from the rest of us.  Contemporary mythology has it that poverty and unemployment are social ills caused by cold-blooded governments and the rank abuses of our money market society.  Anybody unfortunate enough to get trapped by this double whammy suddenly becomes helpless and stupid.  The popular assumption is that, without a battalion of social workers, organizers, services and institutions to direct their every move, the underprivileged have no hope of changing their circumstances.  Faced with our uncaring 21st century, even the most stalwart Horatio Alger character quivers in his shoes, drops out of school and turns to a life of indolence and maybe even drugs.  Society (that’s us, folks) is responsible for these unspecified crimes against the underprivileged and must, therefore, fork over great gobs of money — which for the last fifty years at least, has never been enough.  So goes the prevailing wisdom of our time, perpetrated by a crowd of social commentators who wouldn’t know poverty if it bit them on the bum.

Here’s the real deal.  Poverty is relentless.  No visiting newscast or YouTube sound byte can portray this.  It never takes a holiday.  It sleeps with you like an evil lover.  It seeps into your soul.  It feeds on your heart and sucks your energy until it consumes you.  It’s 25/8 ugly, and the only relief is sex, drugs and rock and rock.  I’m not talking about digging-in-a-dumpster poor – although I suppose the shoe fits.  I’m talking about people who just don’t have enough money – the Have-nots.  These are the people whose children flared out of control in a vomit of violence the other night that sickened even their neighbours.  These are poor people (I don’t care what the current euphemism is) and they exploded in London and elsewhere because they’re poor and we’ve been telling them for fifty years they’re getting screwed.

The current crop of social engineers view the poor as if they’re from another planet.  They theorize and chatter and then go back to their tidy tree-lined avenues and wonder what went wrong with “those people.”  It’s never occurred to them that “those people” want some tree-lined avenues, too.  Basically, the Have-nots want to be Haves.  Having established that point, let’s quit lying to ourselves and others and face the fact that there’s only one combination in our world that leads to permanent “Have-dom.”  It’s pride, education and hard work.  There’s no government program, no social get-fixed-quick scheme and no secret formula.  It’s that simple.  It’s time to quit listening to the caring/sharing class and start applying some bold initiatives to our war on poverty.

There are too many programs to deal with, so let me just use the most notorious one, welfare, as an example.  In its current form, welfare is an implement of permanent debilitation.  Welfare benefits are usually at subsistence levels with no extra pennies available to even stock up on toilet paper when it goes on sale.  For long-term welfare recipients, it’s impossible to get ahead.  Then if they do manage to get a job — even a low-paying, part-time one — their benefits are cut.

This is exactly backwards.  Those benefits should be increased.  There should be a financial reward for pride and hard work, not a punishment.  It should work the same way for education; not idiot education like medieval dance, but quality job training.  Again, benefits should be increased to those willing to go to school – and graduate.  And this should apply across the board; families should receive extra benefits when teenage children do not drop out of school and lose them if they do.  There should be a definable series of financial rewards to anyone willing to help themselves.  Rewarding enterprising people is the way our society functions, and it functions the same for everybody – even the underclass. Yeah, some people are going to scam the system, but the majority won’t – and, by the way, society is paying the money anyway.

Permanently warehousing people in dilapidated neighbours with nothing to look forward to but more of the same hasn’t worked.  Crime, prostitution and drugs offer better financial rewards than poverty line welfare payments.  And the sickening by-product is shame and frustration.  The riots in London prove this.  We need to turn our attention away from forking out money for nothing to offering serious financial benefits to those who want to change their way of life.  If you’re not convinced, here’s one more thing to think about.  Those minor drug dealers who inhabit every poor neighbourhood on the planet are, in reality, just laissez-faire capitalists.  They understand how our world works.  In fact, they understand it a lot better than that army of social workers we’ve hired who can’t seem to figure it out — because they’ve never had to go without.

Free Crack Pipes: A Stupid Idea

Last week, Vancouver Coastal Health, the organization in charge of keeping me and a couple of million other people healthy, set off the stupid alarm.  They announced a pilot program, beginning in October, to provide free crack pipes to drug users (Stay with me!) as part of their Harm Reduction Program.  Their rationale is crack and crystal meth smokers are transmitting dangerous diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C when they share old and damaged pipes.  Also, they say that providing a kit with a new pipe, mouthpiece, filter and a condom to addicts will bring them into direct contact with healthcare workers who can offer health information and encourage them to seek help for their addiction.  Dr. Reka Gustafson, a Vancouver health officer, was quoted in The Vancouver Sun as saying, “We know there’s a demand and chances are what we’re going to be able to supply won’t last very long.”  So, apparently, this offer is good only while supplies last and will cost between 50 and 60 thousand dollars.  What wrong with this picture?

At the risk of being labelled an anti-crack crank, does anybody down at VCH realize these folks are smoking crack?  The Risk Reduction train has pretty much left the station, folks.  I’m no expert, but I’d wager a few loonies that smoking crack is generally detrimental to maintaining a healthy lifestyle.  And providing addicts with the implements of their own destruction simply can’t be the best strategy available for risk reduction.  I might be missing something, but I’m not following the logic here.  To me, giving these people pipes is like handing a guy with emphysema a carton of Marlboros to reduce the risk he’ll encounter walking to the store to buy his own.  Call me old-fashioned, but I remember a time when local health agencies were there to promote health and well-being, not aid in their destruction.

I have no argument with the idea of trying to control the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C among any segment of our population.  These are high-rent diseases that cost all of us a boatload of bucks to treat every year.  Nor do I have a problem with Coastal Health doling out dollars for preventive medicine programs, especially if they’re as cheap as this one seems to be.  Honestly, 50 or 60 thousand is nothing.  That kind of money doesn’t even buy a good-sized nurse these days.  Besides, I’m fairly certain that Coastal Health administrators and executives eat more than that in expense account money.  My problem is nobody in the glass towers has thought this thing through.

Here’s the deal: the entire program seems to be based on one single item of hard evidence: crack and crystal meth addicts share their pipes.  From that, experts have deduced, that chances are good, diseases like HIV, Hepatitis C and others are spread across the addicted population.  There haven’t been any studies to prove this, but it seems a logical conclusion.  Now we have cause and (probably) effect.

Unfortunately, here’s where Coastal Health turned on the stupid machine.  I hate to be rhetorical but how does providing crack addicts with brand new pipes prevent them from sharing their new toys with the less fortunate who didn’t happen to go down to Coastal Health that day?  I would venture to guess that straight-out-of-the-wrapper pipe gets infected on its first use – and re-infected forever after.  I would also venture to guess that your average crack addict is not going to discard or sterilize the new pipe they’ve just used.  It’s been my experience, that crack and crystal meth users are not the most logical of our neighbours.  They’re not going to go back to Coastal Health until they either break or lose the pipe they’ve been given — or, the cops (who are mandated to seize drug paraphernalia, regardless of where it comes from) take it away.

So, in the end, how does this Coastal Health program keep me and a couple of million other people healthy?  It doesn’t.  It’s a proven fact that addicts share their pipes; giving them new ones doesn’t add or subtract from that fact.  If HIV and Hepatitis C are spread by shared pipes, then these diseases will continue to spread.  Fifty thousand dollars later; we’re still in the same place — except by providing the necessary equipment, Coastal Health may have actually contributed to the destructive addiction of several thousand people.  They’ve continued (and perhaps even enhanced) the unholy connection between the addict and the dealer.  And they’ve probably unwittingly assisted in maintaining all the social ills — like poverty, theft and prostitution — that characterize widespread drug use.

There is a cure for addiction, even on the scale that my city faces.  However, as comedian Ron White has said many times, “There’s no cure for stupid.”

Honour Killings, Domestic Violence and Murder

Last week, a man walked into a local newspaper with a weapon.  He found his estranged wife, who worked there, and stabbed her several times.  She died at the scene of the crime, and he was arrested.  The murder was witnessed by a number of people, including one guy who suffered minor injuries when he tried to intervene.  It all seems totally straightforward to me.  However, unlike the majority of big city murders, which don’t usually survive the 48 hour urban news cycle, people are still talking about this one.  In fact, a local open line radio program speculated whether or not the victim had actually provoked the attack.  Interesting.  The difference between this and most of the other homicides around town is the media is reporting it as one of the growing number of Canadian “honour killings.”

There has been much debate recently about honour killing.  Unfortunately, the discussion has been hijacked by questions of immigration and cultural rights.  This woulda/coulda/shoulda talk has tied our hands and diverted our attention from dealing with the problem effectively.  However, if we look at the situation in a critical, objective manner we can put a stop to what’s becoming a recurring social problem before it really gets started.

The hideous thing about “honour killing” is that it now occurs so frequently in our society that we’ve imported a name for it.  It’s almost as though we consider it a subset of the act of murder.  This is not good: it presupposes acceptance.  Although we must now give honour killing a separate identity among all the other heinous acts that plague us, it is a grave mistake to think of it as anything less than premeditated murder.   If we do, we run the risk of psychologically giving it a mitigating circumstance which will only hamper our ability to deal with it.

Furthermore, we are at odds with ourselves over the nature of this form of violence against women.  We must clarify.  The erroneous assumption is that honour killings are just pumped-up domestic violence.  That is not true.  Human Rights Watch defines honour killings as:

…acts of vengeance, usually death, committed by male family members against female family members, who are held to have brought dishonor upon the family. A woman can be targeted by (individuals within) her family for a variety of reasons, including: refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, being the victim of a sexual assault, seeking a divorce—even from an abusive husband—or (allegedly) committing adultery. The mere perception that a woman has behaved in a way that “dishonors” her family is sufficient to trigger an attack on her life. (“Honor Killing,” Wikipedia)

This is a very specific definition which shows us that honour killings differ substantially from domestic violence in two key ways.  First of all, honour killings are premeditated, perpetrated by what would be considered normal, peaceful people – a spike of violence, if you will.  On the other hand, statistics show that most domestic violence cases, especially those resulting in death, are the culmination of escalating episodes of abuse and brutality, usually accelerated by alcohol and/or drugs.  Secondly, honour killings are aggregated acts.  In almost every instance, they have the tacit — if not the active — approval of at least one other family member.  Conversely, the vast majority of documented cases of domestic violence involve a single person, normally a husband or a boyfriend, who acts alone, usually in secret.  As we can see, honour killing and domestic violence are two different animals that must be dealt with separately.

Finally, whether we like it or not, honour killing has a cultural base.  We must face this fact straight on.  We can’t slip/slide around, trying to fool ourselves.  At the same time, however, we must understand that just because we recognize cultural differences; that doesn’t mean the door is open to racism or cultural intolerance.  In fact, just the opposite.  These are Canadian women who are being killed – make no mistake – and they’re under the protection of our entire society.  We cannot lay the blame at the feet of “those people;” those people are us.

So where do we go to from here?  Zero tolerance.  We need to quit muddying the water with useless chatter.  The debate is about murder, not government policy, immigration or cultural insensitivity.  We also need to stop making false assumptions.  Honour killing is a new and different phenomenon which we’ve never had to deal with, in large numbers, before.  We need to remember that.   Finally, and most importantly, we need to quit conjuring up tippy-toe solutions.  It must be perfectly clear: Canadians, old and new, do not tolerate murder, regardless of the circumstances or what the media calls it.  This is non-negotiable, and our penalties must reflect the seriousness of the crime.  We have been warned.  Nationally, there have been over fifteen recognizable honour killingsmurders in the last few years.  The time to stop these horrible crimes was yesterday.