Sunday June 13, 2021
Last Sunday evening, a young man who doesn’t deserve to have a name aimed his black pickup truck at a family taking their evening walk along a sidewalk in London, Ontario. He bounced over the curb and smashed into them.
They were Muslims. The women were wearing hijabs and traditional shalwar kameez -- loose, pleated trousers with a long shirt. “They were visible,” said a family friend.
The grandmother died on the spot. Father, mother, and daughter died in hospital. Only the boy, nine years old, survived his injuries.
What that young man did seems abundantly clear. But the motive for his actions remains (as I write this column) unclear.
Why?
Why them?
Why there, at that particular time?
The 20-year-old driver – assuming the Ontario police got the right man – was arrested without incident in a mall parking lot seven km away. According to witness accounts, he drove up with the front of his truck covered in blood and told a taxi driver, “Call the police. I’ve just killed some people.”
Peer pressure
He was alone at the time of his arrest. I suspect that he had a passenger when he swerved off the road to hit that Muslim family.
By my reading of human nature, we rarely risk doing things we’ll regret when we’re by ourselves; young men especially do them when egged on by someone else.
The same week, the man who killed Barbara Kentner in Thunder Bay, four years ago, was sentenced to eight years in prison. Court records state that he too had been riding around in a pickup truck. And someone else in the truck said – conjecture here – “There’s another (your choice of expletive) hooker on the road! Throw something at her!”
Brayden Busby leaned out the window and flung a heavy metal trailer hitch as the truck sped by.
“I got one!” Busby, then 18, bragged to his buddies.
Barbara Kentner took six months to die of her injuries.
Busby was not a pathological killer. Neither, apparently, was the driver in London. Police said he had no criminal convictions, and left no trail of racist rants on social media. But I’m sure he had a supportive network of some kind.
Social environment
Back when I lived in Toronto, news media expressed horror over a boy, killed, dismembered, stuffed into a black garbage bag, dumped in a trash bin.
I wrote a letter to the newspapers. I argued that their single-minded focus on an individual killer missed the point. They were ignoring the community from which he drew his values.
“No one does something knowing that it’s wrong,” I contended (quoting from memory). “They do it because they think their friends will approve. It may even give them status within that community.”
What most of society considers wrong is not necessarily wrong within the Mafia, for example. Or within the Mexican drug world, as Jeannine Cummings vividly dramatized in American Dirt.
A friend, a clinical psychologist, said that he could not treat an alcoholic, a drug addict, a gambler, a spouse abuser, purely as an individual. Whatever it was did not happen in isolation. It evolved in a particular context.
To treat the individual effectively, he also needed to work with the person’s family and close associates. They created the milieu within which the patient’s flaws could flourish.
Treating individuals had no lasting effect if they went back into the environment that had nurtured their behaviour in the first place.
Toxic elements
“No man is an island,” poet John Donne wrote, long ago. No one stands alone. Our actions, and especially our attitudes, are shaped by those we hang out with.
My granddaughter is black, adopted from Ethiopia. A boy at her high school made “nigger” comments about her. The school gave the boy himself a lecture. But, aa far as I know, it never dealt with the culture in which that boy felt racist slurs were acceptable – his family, his friends, his social media contacts.
His comments simply went underground -- sniggers, giggles, behind her back.
My granddaughter walked out of that school, and won’t go back.
So I would hope that as the Ontario police try to determine what motivated that young man in London to run over a Muslim family out for an evening walk, they also talk to his family. And to his friends. To find out the toxic elements in his environment that led him to believe it was all right, even praiseworthy, to mow down innocent people who had done him no harm.
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Copyright © 2021 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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Your turn
A huge flood of mail about last week’s column, on the finding of 215 bodies buried in the grounds of the Kamloops Residential School. Lots of reading here.
I had assumed mass graves. Jessie Carlson corrected me: “The last I heard is that the burial was in fact 215 separate unmarked graves.
“I agree it is very tragic but it is a confirmation of what has been suspected for a long time.”
Rob Brown: “I was horrified by the report. But not surprised. Maybe too many years in the newsroom. Or too many years doing ethics.
“Oblates of Mary Immaculate did apologize for what happened. But I find it hard to believe that Roman Catholics' sacramental theology would have allowed those bodies to be buried without a proper funeral. Something wrong with that!”
Just to balance viewpoints a little, Steve Roney suggested that two or three child deaths a year over the 100 years of so that the Kamloops School operated was probably a lower death rate – for that time, when TB and other diseases were rampant – than in most other communities.
Penny Rankin wondered, “What haunts me is imagining someone having to repeatedly dig graves...one unmarked site at a time... My imaginings do not envision some huge pit into which bodies were anonymously cast... what is so haunting is knowing that time and time again the body of a child was carried and dumped with no dignity into an unmarked grave...These children suffered together...but died and were buried alone.
“It is clear that the tragic loss of one child wasn't enough to cause even a glimmer or change...nor the second child nor the third, fourth, fifth… Boy, girl, 5-year-old, 10-year-old, not even the pregnant 12-year-old... Nothing changed the pattern...”
“After reading about the children's bones detected at Kamloops, “wrote Randy Hall, “I prayed for their 215 souls. Having just spent a week with my four grandchildren, ages 10 months to 5 years, it seems all the more poignant. I feel almost too sad to muster anger toward that depraved system.
“Martin Buber came to mind, who talked about a world in which anything is allowed in an ‘I – IT’ mentality. And that the only cure for cruelty, judgment, and apathy is a sacred ‘I – THOU’ mentality.”
Marion Logan: “Now I wonder what current Canadian values need to be re-examined and eliminated. Racism is the current issue [Marion anticipates today’s column, above: JT]
“The United Church did offer an apology several years ago [Two apologies, actually: JT]. I wish they would publicize this especially now that the Catholics seem so hesitant to do so.”
`
David Edwards: “From the reading I have done, I will not be surprised if a great many more unidentified children's bodies are found at many more school sites. You are right -- it is not about them, it is about us.”
Karen Lynch called the week “a very heavy week of sorrow, anger and reflection. We Canadians, who pride ourselves for welcoming and caring for the refugees who come here for sanctuary, are having to reckon with the darker part of our nature and our society -- with our willful blindness to the pain of our Indigenous brothers and sisters and to the racism which still exists in many forms in this country. I pray we can put enough pressure on our government to put into action the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- nice words are not enough.
Tom Watson asked, “Whose system would construct something so evil? Our colonial system, that's whose! Because people who were non-European-white were seen as expendable. Unless they became like us.
“A couple of years ago, Tauni Sheldon, an Inuit woman, spoke to our Men's Club about the ‘60s scoop.’ Sheldon's mother had flown from her home in Inukjak to Thunder Bay to have her first baby. Three hours later, Sheldon was taken away and put up for adoption. She was advertised in the Toronto Telegram as ‘Little Miss Eskimo,’ open for adoption. It was all part of the government's ongoing plan to ‘take the Indian out of the Indian’ and the Inuit out of the Inuit. How utterly shameful! You're right, there are no more excuses!”
Bob Rollwagen: “Governments elected by Canadian did this with full knowledge of the citizens. In the 1920s government apparently removed the requirement of headstones and names. Again, a government elected by the citizens.
“In Ontario, I am told our current government cancelled the revised curriculum dealing with these issues. Again, a government elected by the citizens.
“Citizens like to blame the governments they elect, and organizations they trust, for mistakes that at some time were government policies. Democracies only work when citizens act responsibly.”
Wim Kreeft: “The situation in Kamloops is a small revelation of the vile history that we have with First Nations people.
“The colonizers left Europe with their religion firmly written in stone. When they encountered First Nations people, they couldn’t understand the holy relationship these people had with their land, with their environment and with all living things. They referred to Indigenous people as ‘pagan’ or ‘heathen’. Religion-written-in-stone defies the reality of the holiness of life. There is not, nor will there ever be, one spirituality that fits all people.
“The question then becomes, who were the real ‘pagans’ and who were the real ‘heathens’ in this part of Canada’s history?”
Hanny Kooyman: “I felt ashamed to call myself Canadian.”
Two readers took us outside the Canadian context:
Mirza Yawan Baig writes from a Middle Easter perspective: “This is incredibly horrific ,and that it happened in Canada of all places makes it worse for me. Always thought of Canada as different in positive ways. Children? How can people just kill and throw them away? But then they are doing it as we speak. Not Canadians. But others … The Qur’an says about the infant girls that the pre-Islam Arabs used to bury alive: ‘The girl child will ask for what crime had she been murdered.’”
And Don Sandin from an American perspective: “Thanks for writing about the bodies of children found at the Kamloops school. 25 years ago I was involved in New York City to ‘spread the word’ about the travesty of 1921 in Tulsa. The white population erased the community of African Americans, including the use of machine guns and airplanes dropping incendiary bombs. The ‘official’ records show that up to 300 were killed. The truth is that of the 16,000 African Americans who lived in Greenwood, they could only account for 9,000. As Americans we are so proud of our heritage, forgetting that our success was predicated on the slaughter of 1000s of Native Americans and the slavery of millions of Africans. Maybe by calling attention to these horrendous abuses we can raise the consciousness of our countries and maybe cause peoples’ lives to be a little better.”
There was also appreciation for my rethinking of John McCrae’s poem:
Jean Macdonald: “Like your revision of Flanders Field very much.”
Clare Neufeld: “Appreciated your revision of the old familiar poem.”
Jim McKean: “I was overwhelmed with your poem this week. I shared it with my congregation during the message during today's service.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns