The Farm Manager is watching a doc about gangs and street violence in Toronto.
Thirty years ago she was a young idealistic teacher's aide in Regent Park, a neighborhood in Toronto that was as nasty as Jane-Finch is today. While I was working in the garage today I came across a photo album she'd put together during that era.
It's full of typical class photos. A bunch of happy mostly black toddlers with their mostly white teachers. With this being Regent Park, it would be interesting to do a follow-up. How many of those toddlers are dead? How many are in jail? How many made it through to become productive members of society, whatever that means?
The latest wave of immigrants who are struggling with their adjustment to society are the Somali's. There's a good bit of ink being spilled by the main-stream press on the fate of the last wave of Somali immigrants these days.
There's nothing new about immigrants struggling to make a go of it. That's been the lot of every generation of immigrants. They got off the boat at Ellis Island or Pier 21 and they got the shit jobs and lived on the 7th floor of a walk-up tenement, whether they were Italian or German or Jews or Irish.
The Jamaicans and the Somali's came later, and society had changed. The life that a shit job could buy in 1930 or 1950 or 1965 is not the life a shit job can buy today. On top of that they have the handicap of their skin color, and as much as we might want to pretend we're past that, we're not.
But let's not make excuses. That wouldn't be fair to those recent immigrants who "make it" in spite of all the obstacles in their path.
One of those obstacles is the dearth of intact families among the most recent immigrants. However tough it might be to make a go of it when you get off the boat and aren't familiar with the language and the customs, at least you've got your family unit to support you.
When you're a boy in one of those recent immigrant communities you are more than likely not to have that. Times have changed. There aren't even enough of the shit jobs to keep the fathers busy. They drift off, totally emasculated by their inability to provide.
The boys grow up in a fatherless home. They too find out soon enough that the shit jobs that are around aren't enough to support a family, but buddy two floors up is clearing a thousand a week selling weed.
Bingo!
There has been a lot of well-paid head-scratching going on for at least a couple of generations now about how to break this cycle.
It's pretty simple. Young people need opportunity. They need hope.
If the gangs offer more opportunity and hope than society does, it means that we as a society have failed.
What are we going to do about it?
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