Toronto is still writhing after a series of fatal shootings in its black community and still in shock that a white teenaged girl became a Christmas victim of the slaughter. But if truth be told it doesn't really make very much difference if the shootings are in Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton or anywhere else in Canada and it shouldn't matter if the communities in question are black or not.
Nor does it alter the response of the chattering classes, who are so complacent that they fail to understand that they are partly to blame for the mess we now face. The answer is not more social programs and more public money and the cause is not racism.
Of course racism exists, and any native or black person will tell you so. At the same time we as Christians have to ask, for example, why Chinese, South Asian and so many other minority groups are doing so well in Canadian society. They also face racism and often have the added challenge of having English as a second language.
If we want to consider genuine racism, ask the Irish Catholics, Ukrainians and so many others who were told to their faces that they were not welcome and would not get a job. You could have asked my late father, who read the signs announcing, "Jews Need Not Apply" and "No Dogs, No Jews."
Phil Coren did not shoot people on the street. He worked very hard indeed and made the system respect him.
As for social programs, these are similarly irrelevant. It's not that they are redundant but that they have become a feel-good and expensive digression for the middle classes. Throw some money at the troubled urban centres so that we can then ignore them.
These pained communities can certainly use apprenticeship programs where young people are channelled into meaningful jobs and in time become tax-paying and productive citizens. They do not and should not, however, merit special treatment simply because they are incapable of acting responsibly and ethically.
There, I've said it. A minority within these communities are incapable of acting responsibly and ethically. Drunkenness, drug addiction, gang violence, prostitution, pimping, promiscuity, gunplay, knifings, random and callous violence and disregard for other people. A complete and total absence of empathy, a colossal laziness, a swamping greed, a muddy contempt for the efforts and sacrifices of others and a glutinous stupidity.
The notion that a sports facility or a drop-in centre will prevent a young man from becoming a murderer is tenuous at best, insulting and lethal at worst. It's not public money but private values that give people stability and make them decent.
Which is where we have to expose those chatterers who obsess about social programs. These same types of people have campaigned since the 1960s against the very morality and standards that held this country together and gave it a righteous decorum.
These virtues were old-fashioned, we were told, as well as boring and dull. Hard-working fathers who sacrificed and remained faithful and present were archaic. Marriage was dead, fidelity confining and respect for tradition and law a thing of the past. The damage done was extraordinary.
There were always criminals and there was always crime, but nothing like today. Gangsters killed for money. Now they kill for fun. There were sacred areas. Now the whole nation is a killing field. There were families. Now there is breeding.
Yes, it stings when we hear the truth. Thirty-year-old women with teenage sons and neither of them having any idea who the father might be. Mothers with four children from different men. Or parents teaching their kids how to drink and encouraging them to become dependent on narcotics as well as the state.
I'm tired of the excuses and the lies. It's partly but not completely about race and it's partly but not completely about poverty. It's about those who are willing to join society and those who are not. It's time that as Christians we in particular asked the questions and gave the answers that others are frightened of even considering.
