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How To Write An Essay
Admin Note: Quadrant Interceptor is a resident of Montreal and a former student at Dawson College. He sent this post via email and it has been reprinted (unedited) with permission.
I’ve always had faith in the number 13. I rail against the popular belief that it’s bad luck. I have a black cat, I love a full moon. I long to hang out in a graveyard on a Friday the 13th during a full moon and jam with folk as crazy as I am. But now my faith is shaken.
At approximately 1:30pm on Wednesday September 13th 2006, I was on the corner of Sherbrooke & Guy in Montreal Quebec waiting to catch the 24 bus when a police car blocked off westbound access. I tried to ask him what was going on but he wasn’t havin’ it. Snubbed by the cop. I decided to see for myself as I noticed a helicopter hovering over-from my perspective-Marianoplois College.
Seeing a couple unmarked cars with sirens whiz by, I though there had been a hostage situation. I also noticed droves of students on cell phones. Half way to Dawson I asked a couple kids what had happened and heard the worst: there had been a shooting. My first instinct was to hope it wasn’t a couple of rowdy black kids fighting over girls and bling. Sad to say, but it’s happened before.
When I got to Sherbrooke & Atwater, it was cordoned off. Students milled about in various levels of stress on cell phones. Lambert Closse & Maisonneuve and St-Catherine & Atwater became hubs of concern full of students and parents and staff. The police were holding it down. Being a former student at Dawson, this was particularly painful to see this happen. People had been shot in the atrium, where some of my best memories of school with Dominoes and card games and jokes had taken place.
I was concerned for two people in particular, my aunt and the father of my best friend. They are staff at Dawson college. I made a sign with the names of them both on a large piece of card stock and walked around, rather surprised that no one else thought of it. I got a lot more attention than I bargained for, but it helped because people came up to me to let me know that my aunt was okay. But I didn’t hear anything about my friend’s father. My friend showed up at the scene and we eventually discovered that his father had driven home and had no access to a phone. Today I found out that by some grace of god, karma or whatever energy force you care to believe in, he left the building at almost the same time things started to happen. To re-park his car. Minutes before he left, he was talking to the girl who got shot in the leg. Holy shit.
My aunt on the other hand was inside while it happened and bravo for her as she ushered students into her office and locked the door. I commend the staff and students of Dawson College for their sense of community and bravery, the fantastic work of the Montreal Police Department and the students of Concordia for setting up a place where parents, students and staff could meet with food and information waiting for them. My heart goes out to the wounded,. The parents and the parents of the young girl who was killed. My heart also goes out to the parents of the maniac responsible for this horror. Could they have known? Were the warning signs evident? Who’s to know for sure, but the shock of knowing that your offspring is responsible for so much death and pain is something no parent should know. Still, this is their burden and like all parents they should have taken the best care of their child they could have given. It is unjust that lack of responsibility, respect and love at home should result in the suffering of thousands. Again.
City of Shootings
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened in our great city. Marc Lepine killed 14 women at Ecole Polytechnique in 1989, literally blocks from my house. His hatred for women fueled his actions and the inaction of the police-trained to section off the area and wait for SWAT while he continued to kill-has resulted in their lightning-quick response to yesterday’s events.
In 1992, three years after the atrocity at Ecole Polytechnique, Mechanical Engineering Professor Valery Fabrikant opened fire on his collegues killing three of them. Now Dawson College, the largest English college in the province of Quebec, the home of great memories, excellent staff and happy students from around the world.
Although this may be considered as an isolated incident, the problem of school shootings is not. Lest we forget the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in 1999 and the shootings a week later at W.R. Myers High School in Taber, Alberta, and several more around the world.
The Columbine and Taber shootings were the result of isolation and teasing by peers. It is not quite known what the motivations were for the shooter at Dawson, but the disturbing incidents point to a horrible cancer within our competitive society. The unfair treatment of those who are considered losers, outsiders, nerds and freaks. Some
of us have found avenues to channel this pain, many don not and a few lash out, with fatal results. Back in the day, shootings just didn’t happen. Twenty and thirtsysomethings, ask your parents.
But as we are exposed to more and more violence-and more importantly the flippant attitude towards it and its repercussions through media-it only stands to reason that there will be those who are numbed to it. Worse yet that they would use violence as their only means of communication.
These are dangerous times. Video games, movies and television are tightening the noose on entertainment and violence. Soldiers listen to rock and roll as they invade neighbourhoods overseas. Cool weapons and endless lives to killer soundtracks can be found in videogames at your local Futureshop. A healthy mind can deal with these games and movies, but what about those who fall into the cracks?
Government has also taken advantage of this phenomenon in their recruiting campaigns for the army. just look at their ads. But as a creator of grimy stories I also feel responsible. Who will think I’m glorifying death and violence? What effect will the dark themes I explore through text and visual art have on those who are isolated and feel they have no other way to communicate?
These topics have to be face with frank discussion. Let us hope that recent events can help us come together and find solutions.
I clearly remember the day Jane Creba died. I was returning home from a haircut in Toronto’s Chinatown, and as I passed by the Eaton Centre, I noticed that Yonge Street was closed off and several police cars were parked nearby. A shooting had occurred, somebody said. I had half a mind to investigate the matter further, but my better judgement prevailed and I continued walking along Dundas Street.
The next day more details about the crime emerged. A woman had been killed, caught in the crossfire of what appeared to be gang warfare. Her name was Jane Creba, and she was a fifteen-year-old student at Riverdale Collegiate Institute. Within a week a memorial was set up at the spot where she was shot, with hundreds of passersby leaving flowers, stuffed animals and other paraphernalia there.
Jane Creba’s death was the 78th murder of 2005, a relatively high number compared to previous years. People wondered aloud whether Toronto was safe anymore. After all, if Ms. Creba could be shot on a busy downtown street in broad daylight while doing nothing more dangerous than looking for Boxing Day sales, anybody could be shot. Another fact that stood out was that Creba was White and her shooters were Black. Memories of the Just Desserts slaying more than a decade earlier, in which a young Greek-Canadian girl by the name of Georgina Leimonis was killed at a popular Toronto eatery during a robbery by several Black youths, came flooding back. And as in the Just Desserts incident, there was no shortage of commentary on the Creba case.
Like vultures gnawing at a corpse, White Supremacists, not surprisingly, jumped on Ms. Creba’s death to spout off on the supposed dangers of non-White immigration to Canada. Individuals who hadn’t given a hoot about her during her lifetime suddenly acted as if she were a long-lost sister. Even American racists like the Stormfront White Nationalist Community sat up and took notice.
But liberals of all colours weren’t above using Jane’s demise to advance their own causes either. Some blamed the actions of the young men who shot her on former Ontario Premier Mike Harris’ cutbacks to social programs. “These are the children of Mike Harris†became a familiar refrain. Racism was also offered as an explanation. Toronto Sun columnist Rachel Giese, who is White, suspected that part of the reason for these youths’ involvement in crime was that “for their entire lives, they were made to feel worthless, that they didn’t matter and that if they died no one would hold a vigil or mourn.â€
Ms. Giese wrote as well, “Whatever side of the gun they’re on, young, poor Black men are in crisis.†Indeed, a disproportionate number of the homicides committed in Toronto in 2005 involved Blacks, both as perpetrators and as victims. Many, though by no means all, of the latter had previous criminal records. This thus begs the question: why are Blacks overrepresented in crime in comparison to their numbers in the population? The reason traditionally given by liberals – like Rachel Giese – is racism, with poverty and lack of social programs as close seconds. However, this explanation is belied by the fact that East Asians, who too have faced discrimination in Canada (the Chinese head tax, the internment of Japanese Canadians, et cetera), are on average LESS likely to engage in crime than Whites are. So while I certainly won’t deny the existence of racism in this country or the possibility it may have played some part in the Creba and Leimonis shootings, something else is clearly going on here.
It is also an open secret that most of the “Black†crime in Toronto is committed by people from the island of Jamaica. Jamaica, as it happens, has one of the highest murder rates in the world – so much so that it’s lost favour as a tourist destination in the last twenty years or so. Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente put it this way: “The violent culture of Jamaica sheds far more light on Toronto’s gun-and-gang problem than [Mike] Harris’ cruel decision to shut down the Anti-Racism Secretariat.â€
Nonetheless, I can’t let Whites completely off the hook for many of the problems within the Black community. At this point, though, much of the blame lies not with the White Supremacists – whom, let me be clear, I find odious – but with White so-called “progressives.†The latter, albeit unintentionally, have set in place a series of social trends that have proven disastrous to the Black population (not that they’ve been good for Whites). I cite here the writings of a young Asian-American man named Arthur Hu. He chastises liberals for “promoting drugs, promiscuity and abdication of personal responsibility.†Take the issue of drugs. One of the men involved in the Just Desserts case was reported by witnesses to have been high on something when he fired the shot that killed Georgina Leimonis. A good number of the gang-related shootings in Toronto have involved conflicts over drug deals or dealers’ “territory.†As one poster to a website stated, some young Black men get involved in selling and distributing illegal substances because there is an eager and willing market for them – consisting primarily of upscale Whites. But who promoted the use of drugs as “cool†and “hip?†Think of White progressives like Timothy “Expand Your Consciousness†Leary or the marijuana-loving glitterati of Ithaca, New York.
I do not, by the way, support the “War on Drugs.†For one, I think it’s both futile and wastefully expensive, and two, in a democracy we should be free to make foolish decisions. It’s something else, though, to openly encourage people to make foolish decisions or condone their doing so. For instance, it’s perfectly within my rights to dance naked on my balcony in minus 20 Celsius weather. I would also hope that if I ever showed any inclination to do such a thing, the people who claimed to care for me would tell me how incredibly stupid I was being. So by glamourizing drugs, liberals have done Blacks (and Whites, for that matter) no favour.
To end on a more upbeat note, some members of the Black population are taking measures to stem violence in their community. Here the Black church has a proactive role to play. Much attention was given to the visit to Toronto of Eugene Rivers, the African-American minister responsible for the “Boston miracle,†a series of faith-based programs that reduced crime rates in that city dramatically. Even before Rivers’ trip to Toronto, however, a number of Black pastors in the Jane-Finch neighbourhood had stepped forward to urge gang members to lay down their guns. It is in the hands of individuals like these, who are literally “on the ground†and who don’t necessarily subscribe to dogma of any political stripe, in which the Black community’s problems have the best chance of being resolved.
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Reprinted with permission. Catch this post and more on With Good Reason, to be launched during March 2006
Given the current global environment and uproar over recently published and re-published cartoons, I find myself appreciating life in Canada more than ever. A bastion of peaceful harmony, in which all people are welcome to live and celebrate their unique cultural traditions. We have ‘official’ multi-cultural policies that celebrate and promote this. One can argue that this has become our ‘culture’ and really is in no need of any government sponsorship. This reality is more than evident in our major urban centres, and as long as the common value of mutual tolerance and respect is maintained, the system works fine. What would happen if our pre-multicultural national commitments ever conflicted with this ‘live and let live’ neutral attitude. The thought occurred to me that we are not technically a neutral country. As a standing member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since WWII, we as a nation-state would be obligated to defend any attacks upon some of the very nations whose flags are being burned around the Muslim world.
Is it inconceivable to imagine further escalation of this tension? After all, actions usually beget reactions. European nationalism had been on the decline since Jeorg Haider and Jean Marie Le Pen first made headlines over a decade ago. I am sure the ‘mainstream’ secular Europeans are intent on defending secularism against Islam, just as they did and continue to do against the Vatican. No doubt the long standing xenophobic elements in Europe will try and pounce on this collective mood, to raise their political stock.
And what will Canada do if the festering anger and economic dysfunction within much of the Muslim world results in some coordinated terrorist attacks against certain European Allies? Are we as a nation even psychologically prepared to deal with such attacks and the mass celebrations likely to follow? In true Canadian spirit, we would likely find a way to maintain the moral position and continue to follow the mantra of fighting international terrorism. But what if such an attack was state sponsored or condoned? Would Canada be prepared to engage any radical Middle Eastern country that attacked a fellow NATO member through terrorist strikes? Perhaps we should do more to diffuse the situation now in the great tradition of Canadian Diplomacy. Today’s interconnected world was established largely under a Western post WWII paradigm – in which Canada’s place was clearly defined. What will happen if a radicalized Muslim world wants to change the rules?
On September 30, 2005, Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons unfavourably depicting Islamic religious figure, the Prophet Muhammad. Depicting the Prophet Muhammad in any way, shape or form is condemned in Islamic practice. The initial printing went largely unnoticed. On January 10, 2006, a Norwegian news publication became the first of many European publications to reprint the cartoons which followed suit February 1. Reaction among Muslims was vehement and violent.
On January 26, Saudi Arabia became the first Islamic nation to recall its ambassador to Denmark. January 30, Palestinian gunmen raided the EU’s Gaza offices demanding an apology. On January 31, the Jyllands-Posten apologized for offending the Islamic community, shortly thereafter, the Danish Prime Minister condemned demonizing any religious or cultural group. This, however, did little to prevent further uproar. Danish dairy company Arla, among others, has seen its profits plummet due to boycotts. Protestors in Syria besieged Danish and Norwegian foreign embassies February 4. The following day the same happened to the Danish embassy in Beirut.
Opinions on the cartoons are varied. Various European and North American newspapers have expressed support for free speech and secular democracy. Others have expressed dismay at the insensitivity of publishing what could be construed as hate literature. Extremists throughout the world have called for, “Death to Denmark,†and for the “hand that drew to be severed.†Who is in the right?
The issue is especially contentious in the wake of rioting that rocked Paris in the fall of 2005. Members of France’s sizable Muslim community were largely responsible for the rioting. This, of course, in addition to talk among the OECD of sanctions against Iran, a Hamas victory in Palestinian elections with Ariel Sharon in a coma and an American occupation in Iraq. One need not be reminded of the events of September 11, 2001, or the American “War on Terrorâ€.
This is only the latest event in a long-standing historical divide between Europeans, Christian, secular or otherwise, and Middle Eastern Muslims. In fact, this conflict dates at least to 635, when Islamic troops under caliph Abu Bakr seized Demascus and defeated the Byzantine Empire at the Battle of Yarmuk. This was the first of many in a long series of battles between Byzantine and Islamic forces, culminating in the conquest of Constantinople and its conversion to Istanbul in 1473 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. At least nine crusades resulted from this period of conflict.
The Ottoman Empire persisted until 1922, frequently sparring with the neighbouring Austro-Hungarian Empire which lasted until it lost World War I. In the 1820s France, Great Britain and Russia intervened militarily on behalf of Greeks struggling for independence from the Ottoman Turks. Not the first or last time such an alliance of European powers confronted the Ottomans. The Spanish inquisition, founded in 1478, was largely a tool to unite the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile under a single religious banner following years of Islamic dominion in the region. Europe owes much of its modern day political character to opposition of Muslim religious and political forces.
Conflict meant exposure, and increased involvement with Eastern powers meant a reintroduction of classical thought into western European society. These events precipitated the European Renaissance and the development of humanist philosophy. Conflict also meant trade. Trade meant an injection of capital and technology, such as the Arab sail-building and navigation techniques that allowed the Portuguese to round the Cape of Good Hope, Columbus to reach the Caribbean and Magellan to circumnavigate the globe. As the European locus widened, humanism developed into individualism and secularism and eventually the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. By the end of the 18th century Enlightenment ideas such as secularism and democracy took hold across the European continent through revolution and reform.
Modernist notions of progress paved the way for industrialization. Throughout the 19th century a clear gap developed between the industrial imperial powers, concentrated in Europe, and the rest of the world. The 20th century changed little. The end of World War I established the United States of America as an industrial power on the world stage, and placed a great deal of the Middle East under European control by mandate of the League of Nations. The end of World War II saw the US and the USSR rise to global dominance poised to do battle in a grand ideological conflict. In addition, Allied action created the state of Israel. Through two world wars and the creation of modern day states such as Iran, Iraq, Syria and Egypt, Europeans and Americans found themselves altering the political character of the Middle East.
The creation of Israel, possibly the single most divisive political issue in the world today, spurred immediate military violence and drew the lines upon which modern day ideological warfare would be fought. Terrorism became a watch word in the West because of Yasser Arafat and the PLO and events such as the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Growing industrialization meant that the Middle East also possessed a highly valued commodity, oil. High crude prices in 1960 created American and European pressure to create the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, a worldwide pricing regulatory body. The Yom Kippur War of 1967 led Arab members of OPEC to create their own overlapping Organization of Arab Petroleum Producing Countries.
The Middle East, trapped between Eastern and Western Europe, was of utmost strategic importance to both major Cold War powers. Americans and Russians frequently tested their arms in Israeli and Egyptian conflicts. Brits and Americans installed successive regimes in both Iran and Iraq and backed these regimes in conflicts against one another. The Cuban Missile crisis ended in a Russian pledge to remove weapons from Turkey. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 preceeded the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and, with American funding and training, created the Osama Bin Laden of today.
Which brings us to September 11. To invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. To bombings in Spain and Britain. To riots in France. To Danish cartoons. Back to today. Back to the question of who is in the right. Is this a conflict of ideas? Of religions? Of cultures? Of politics? Of history? It is all of these, to be sure. Who is in the right? Not the bigots who publish hate literature in European newspapers. Certainly not the reactionaries who incite violence among fellow Muslims.
Who is in the right? Those in the right are those who recognize the commonalities of their respective cultures who share so much history. Those who realize that the highest ideals are love, compassion and understanding, according to Jesus Christ, the Prophet Muhmmad, Spinoza, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant and Jean-Paul Sartre. If Danes are entitled to publish disrespectful cartoons, disrespected Muslims are entitled to react. Muslims, to be sure, have a great deal to be angry with the Western world about. If by one’s reaction, however, one serves only to further alienate and anger, one does Muhammad injustice in more ways than one. Hatred is a vice in any language, religion or culture.
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This column was reprinted with permission from the author. Dashmaster will be collaborating with myself and others on a new website called “With Good Reason”, scheduled to be launched March 2006. More details are forthcoming.
-Cynapse
Why is the controversy from a few satirical pseudo-humourous cartoons by the obscure Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten still news?
Perhaps the answer does not lie within the powder keg of today’s angry Muslim world, but rather in the nature of human behaviour itself.
Is it an insult to any religion, including Islam, if a non-believer says or draws something out of ignorance? How about atheistic conviction? In some ways, being offended insinuates that everyone must accept an imposed set of moral values (as defined by a given religious belief system).
The growing tension can be traced to the following point of conflict: different groups may have different moral values. And some groups feel their values are supreme.
However, this over-simplification belies the complexity of the violent reactions around the world. Why are we seeing churches, flags and embassies burned? Do Muslims genuinely feel they are under attack? Is the existence of non-religious secular societies a threat to any religious theocracy? The answer is probably yes to the latter two questions.
Belligerence is a characteristic that you can find in many places and on many levels. In nature, certain creatures are left alone because would be attackers know the consequences of a confrontation. A great example is the skunk – size advantage does not alleviate the fear of having several days of tomato juice baths. Belligerence is effective.
To see how collective destructive behaviour is a product of the human experience, we need look no further than a typical schoolyard bullying episode. Gradually increasing the scale, there are many (too many) cases of ‘groups’ feeling and acting out aggression towards other groups. Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, Sudan today, the American experience with Native, African, and immigrant Americans, L.A gang wars, and gun violence in any major city where one group of youth has to make a ‘statement’ against another.
Does Islam promote belligerence? As with Christianity, Islam was at least partly spread with the sword, but proselytizing through force (in the name of any religion) has likely seen its heyday. That said, if we isolate the passion behind mass collective feelings, we can deduce a pattern. Large-scale violence for a cause (religious, or ideological) is nothing new. Has the Muslim world collectively decided that violence and terror somehow is an effective deterrent against competing cultural ideologies? Is this a defensive strategy? I am certain that the majority does not engage in violence or terror, but it is likely that mainstream attitudes do hold sympathy, or at least understanding for it.
Can we get any insights from other ‘competing’ cultures? Unlike previous iterations of international communism during the Cold War, China doesn’t seem to see the existence of democratic countries as a threat. Is belligerence simply not a character of the Chinese culture? Or have the Chinese strategically adopted elements of capitalism in order to maximize their national benefit?
In general, communists worldwide have given up on the idea of international revolution. Let’s hope cooler head prevail in the current Muslim world. Should the tide of violence and intolerance toward secularism continue, we may be witnessing the onset of a new Cold War between ‘East and West’. If this is the case, let’s hope that the inevitable global rise in nuclear proliferation does not cross paths with religious-based fanatical terrorism.
Unlike the conflict with the Soviet Union, it is hard to imagine any stability coming from Mutually Assured Destruction. Deterrence is irrelevant when actors are genuinely convinced of their righteous place in the afterlife.
The fundamental boundary between church and state is still being defined in much of the world, particularly the Muslim world. Until such basic issues are resolved, we are speaking different languages, and we will continue with competing cultures.
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This column was reprinted with permission from the author. NewsJunkie will be collaborating with myself and others on a new website called “With Good Reason”, scheduled to be launched March 2006. More details are forthcoming.
-Cynapse
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