Читать книгу How the Granola-Crunching, Tree-Hugging Thug Huggers Are Wrecking Our Country! - Lowell Ph.D. Green - Страница 5

It’s been more than 12 years but the call still gives me nightmares! Helen is her name. She is probably still in shock. Her voice is almost too calm. Her words chilling. “My father died right out in front of your building last night,” she says. “They walked right over top of him. They were so anxious to get on the damn streetcar they stepped right over him. They could tell he wasn’t some falling-down drunk. He was dressed in a three-piece suit, for heaven’s sake. He was a businessman having a heart attack during rush hour on St. Clair Avenue in downtown Toronto and no one could spare him a minute.” She hesitates for a moment, her voice beginning to break. “The last thing he must have seen was people’s legs walking right over him. Is our civilization starting to crumble?” She begins to cry. “What they did to my father. Was that civilized?”

I am dumbfounded. All my years of hosting radio talk shows has not prepared me for this.

The call comes near the end of my evening show on Toronto’s CFRB, at that time the most listened to radio station in Canada. The question I posed was whether the Canadian civilization as we knew it was beginning to deteriorate. Most callers seemed to think it was and related stories that proved, to them at least, that while the country may not be going to hell in a handcart, we are faced with very serious decay—moral and otherwise.

The first call of the evening sets the tone. It’s from a woman who only a couple of weeks previously had smashed her car into a pole on Avenue Road. “I’m lying there behind the wheel,” she says, “my head feels like someone’s taken a sledge hammer to it, I’m bleeding like a stuck pig when this guy comes rushing over, rips open the car door, grabs my purse, which has fallen onto the floor, and runs off. For all he knew I was dying. He couldn’t have cared less. I couldn’t believe it. We’re not living in a civilized society anymore. It’s a bloody jungle!”

As I recall, there were a few calls a bit more uplifting than that, a couple of the stories were actually kind of funny, but for the better part of three hours it was mostly a chapter from the sorry side of life in the big city today.

A mugging with dozens of people standing around unwilling to help. A father in a fit of road rage giving the finger and screaming some unpleasantness at another driver, undeterred by the two kids in his back seat. Teen punks cursing and swearing in the back of a bus; that sort of thing. None of it supporting the thesis that we are building a better society in this country.

And then finally the call from Helen. Only one young woman had stayed at the streetcar stop with her dying father. “I asked several people to dial 911,” she told Helen, “I’m not sure if anyone even did that. Most people wouldn’t even look down as they stepped over him to get their ride home.” By the time an ambulance arrived it was too late. Sad, sad, sad.

There was a time when that kind of callous disregard for human life would have been shocking. Not today. Nothing in our society today seems to shock us anymore. Being shocked at human behaviour in Canada today seems kind of old-fashioned, quaint even.

‘What’s happening to us?” ask several callers. “Where are we headed? How did we let this happen?”

As usually occurs in discussions of this nature, responses to those questions range from the ridiculous to the sublime but almost everyone seems to agree on one thing: Canadian civilization is in a serious state of decline. And after some urging from me, all agree that there is such a thing as a Canadian civilization. Not as powerful, not as influential as the American civilization, but nonetheless distinct. Surely most of us agree that we are different here in Canada. We are a people quite distinct from any other. We are different from the European civilizations from which most of us sprang and different as well from the American. Most callers agree that one thing we share with the American civilization is that we find ourselves facing very serious decay, moral and otherwise. The Canadian civilization, like the American, is in decline. When I suggest that this decline is occurring while European and some Asian civilizations are in the ascendancy, I meet with serious opposition. The consensus that night on my CFRB show was that Western civilizations, right across the board, are in decline.

One of the more intelligent callers suggests the decline— the decay—is not political—“it is not economic either,” he says. “Those are only the symptoms. It has to do with the question of our entire way of life—our civilization is unravelling around us.”

It’s awfully hard not to agree. Everywhere you look you see evidence of it. You don’t have to go back to a Toronto talk show more than a decade ago to see it and hear it. Even as I am writing this book, a caller to my show on CFRA in Ottawa steadfastly maintains that an extra ten dollars a month on his pension is just as important as anyone’s life. We are discussing a threatened strike by some 120,000 CUPE workers that, among other things, would take some ambulances and paramedics off the road. I suggest that there has to be a better way. “Surely,” I tell the caller, “you wouldn’t be prepared to risk your mother’s life for an additional ten dollars a month on your pension!” “I certainly would,” he asserts. “They are of equal value.” He later informs me that his mother is dead so the question isn’t relevant. “Is an extra ten dollars a month on a pension worth risking anyone’s life?” I ask. “Absolutely,” he replies once again. “They are of equal value.” When he refuses to rethink his statement, I tell him he is a disgusting human being, and boot his sorry butt off the air but I have no doubt whatsoever that his views are widely held.

It’s not that long ago that striking Montreal firemen cut hoses when supervisory staff tried to quell a major blaze that threatened many lives!

In Toronto, a sad little six-year-old boy slowly dies of hunger, thirst and dreadful neglect. Even as he loses more and more weight, can barely talk or walk, professional childcare workers don’t spot anything wrong. Or at least they say they don’t! Boarders living in the house see the slow murder but don’t do anything for fear of being evicted. It’s not their problem!

And let’s have a look at crime in general. If ever there was an example of how we continue to adhere to terribly failed policies, surely it is in the field of crime and punishment. Despite all the evidence (and there is plenty of it) that so-called “soft justice” does not work, we continue to pretend that it does.

We are being told that the overall crime rate is down slightly in the past few years, but that is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. Don’t take my word for it, check out an editorial that appeared in the Ottawa Sun on April 24, 2006, a few days after Stephen Harper introduced his get-tough-on-crime package to the Commons. In it, the Sun says: “Violent crime in Canada today is 35 percent higher than it was just 20 years ago.” You read that right. It’s from last year’s Statistics Canada report on the crime rate.

But how is this possible, you’re asking? Hasn’t the “hug-a-thug” crowd constantly told us that crime is going down and thus there is no need to toughen our laws?

Well, what liberal politicians, academics and pundits have been doing is quoting the statistics very selectively. It’s true that after peaking in 1991, violent crime has been dropping slowly. Today it’s down about 10 percent from a decade ago. But those who want to coddle criminals don’t tell you that this very slight decline has in no way matched the explosion in violent crime that started in the 1960s and continued for 30 years. The real story is that violent crime today is at levels that would have been considered appallingly high only two decades ago.

If, in fact, crime in Canada has declined slightly in the past few years, it surely has as much to do with our citizens locking themselves into little fortresses at night as it does any improvement in the moral climate. Playgrounds go empty because parents won’t let their children walk down the block unescorted. In some of our buildings, seniors cower in their tiny apartments most of the day, afraid to even venture into the hallways where very often punks, prostitutes, and pimps have taken over. I will never forget one woman’s anguished call to my show. “I went to get on the elevator in my building last night,” she said, “two people were having sex and asked me if I wanted to join in!” There are some, I suppose, who might think that kind of thing is funny, unless of course the victim happened to be their mother trying to live out the last few years of her life in peace and security.

One thing we are all only too familiar with is the frightening escalation of juvenile crime, especially violent juvenile crime that is up about 126 percent since 1986 (Statistics Canada Report on Crime 2005).

But our decaying civilization cannot be measured in crime figures alone; that is only one indicator. Ancient Rome didn’t have a whole lot of crime, mainly because you’d get fed to the lions for stealing a loaf of bread or crucified for challenging religious beliefs. Rome’s decay went much deeper than that. It had to do with the moral fibre of its people—once the bravest, most daring, most civilized in the world, or certainly since the ancient Greeks.

The story of the Romans and the Greeks, who created marvellous civilizations and then allowed them to rot away from within, is a story which has been repeated throughout history. There have been a great number of Neros fiddling away while our cities and our civilizations burn.

• • •

One measure of the temper of our moral decay is the approximately 40,000 federal public servants, living in Quebec, who just prior to the 1995 Quebec Referendum signed a deal with Jacques Parizeau assuring them of equal-paying jobs in the new Kingdom of Quebec. Most of the 40,000 saw nothing wrong with workers accepting pay from Canadian taxpayers while signing a deal with the enemy!

More recently of course, the same Union recommended that its members support several separatist candidates in the Outaouais. Gatineau did just that during the January 2006 election, electing a separatist. Thousands of federal public servants voted for a party that wants to break Canada apart, while accepting cheques every week from Canadian taxpayers.

Not very good value for the billions of dollars we have spent trying to buy the loyalty of Quebec francophones!

The decay can also be measured by the fact that in the fall of 2003, the education of some 16,000 of our children was threatened by an Ottawa teachers’ work-to-rule and school board lockout, even as three million dollars was paid out to teachers for unused sick leave. Obviously both the school board and the teachers believe that paying millions of dollars in unused sick leave to retiring teachers takes precedence over educating our children.

Today, at a time when our education system slips further and further behind that of most European and Asian nations, it is widely reported that we in Ontario owe more than one billion dollars in unused sick leave pay to retiring teachers! Strikes affecting the education of tens of thousands of school children across Canada are commonplace because we as a nation cannot agree that education is a basic right and that methods of settlement which do not use children as pawns must be adopted.

A recent US News Today story reported that fully 76 percent of American children graduating from high school cannot read or write at a level European Union nations now deem appropriate for entry into university. We don’t have comparable figures in Canada since we don’t have universal testing, but most people who know anything about it will admit we are only marginally ahead of the Americans, if at all.

Here’s another scary thought: A recent test indicated that the average Canadian high school graduate was at least two years behind students of the same age in India. In science we are so far behind most Asian countries we are hardly in the race.

You don’t need nationwide tests to prove any of this. Just check around the neighbourhood. We have a friend whose ten-year-old daughter has just been tested and found to have reading and math comprehension at the grade-two level. She’s in grade five!

In my opinion, failure to make the education of children the highest priority is an indication of a civilization in decline. Nothing should take precedence over education, especially in today’s global economy. Common sense dictates that if our children cannot compete in the classroom it is only a matter of time until the country itself cannot compete with better educated populations. Sadly, in Canada today the education of our children seems to take a back seat to union contracts, tenure, province-wide negotiations, school board amalgamations, pension plans, prep time, PD days, and sick leave.

Listen, if this was a great civilization and not one in decline, here is what we would do: We would tell our schools, “You must educate at least 76 percent of the students who come to you to an accepted international level or we will find someone else who can.” If 76 percent of high school graduates can’t read or write at an international level, close the school down and start all over again. Get new administrators, new teachers, find someone who can do the job and if the next bunch we hire can’t do it properly fire them and get someone who can. They can do the job in India. They can do the job in Korea, in France, in Germany—then, by damn, we’ll do it here in Canada.

But would we ever do anything even close to that here? Not on your life. The malaise is so deep that even robbing our children of a proper education has not as yet motivated us to take action we all know should be taken—must be taken—if we are to compete globally.

Much of the decline is crazily enough the result of good intentions. We have always fancied ourselves in Canada as a kinder, gentler people. The 16-year-old doesn’t get along with his old man; no problem, get on the government nipple. The taxpayers will look after you. It’s the merciful thing to do, goes the mythology, at least the mythology of the Left, the ones I often only half jokingly describe as the granola-crunching, tree-hugging thug huggers.

The 14-year-old single mother; no problem, no shame, no chasing the father, just come on board the welfare train; we’ll look after you and, by the way, if you want some more children, that’s just fine and dandy too. The more you have the more we’ll pay you and as an extra bonus we’ll absolve you of all blame and responsibility; we’ll pretend it’s all society’s fault.

Whatever you do, don’t even think about raising the issue of morality. That’s an outdated judgmental word. The state owes you anything you want.

And how about the 26-year-old assembly line worker who gets laid off? What do we say to him? Hey man, no way you should drive a cab or flip burgers. That’s beneath you, man. You’re entitled to the same wages and benefits you were getting before. Take a lower-paying job? Are you nuts? That’s just the capitalist swine trying to take advantage of you. Besides which, if you don’t have a job it’s the government’s fault.

All done, at least originally, with the best of intentions. The Left, the political and intellectual elites, have most of us convinced this is the way to go. Many of us honestly believe we can measure a nation’s compassion by the number of people we have on welfare.

When Mike Harris came along and cut welfare payments by about 20 percent, within a year the welfare rolls in Ontario dropped by more than 200,000 people. Almost all got jobs, something most logical people would think was a wonderful thing. Logic, unfortunately, is pretty much a stranger to large numbers of Canadians, which explains their response. Many screamed bloody murder! Terrible, discrimination, cruel, the cuts are killing people, it’s outrageous was the mantra of many of my callers with echoes across the country. Some of the NDP’s leading lights went so far as to predict widespread rioting. “People will be dying in the streets,” I even had callers proclaiming.

Think of it. Mike Harris in his first four years as Premier saw an increase of some 700,000 jobs in Ontario. The welfare rolls were cut in half, thousands of people who had never worked a day in their lives before went out and got a job, but to this day the majority of Ontarians will tell you this was a very bad thing!

All of this after just one generation of socialism. Imagine what it will be like when our grandchildren begin running things! Unless, of course, we straighten them out.