Feeding the Habits We’re Fighting

Ronald Duckhorn violently, charged with violently assaulting a woman in 2020, has violently assaulted another woman in the washroom at Second Beach in Stanley Park

Matthew 12: 33-34 :: A Tree Is Known by Its Fruit

³³ “Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. ³⁴

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A tree is known by its fruit. Imagine Vancouver as a tree? What fruit does it bear? How can we surmise this tree, based on its fruit?

Reader, Vancouver has a problem. Like many cities in Canada does have a problem.

Reader, look at that CSO profile. Why does this continue to happen?

Recently a man entered a donair shop with a machete and threatened the staff and helped himself to some of the meat, using his machete to cut off some meat for himself. Despite the seriousness of the crime, threatening a person with a weapon, and committing robbery, the justice system released him on bail.

There’s been a spate of violent crime committed by recidivist offenders, or those out on bail. The mayor of Vancouver and the VPD, together with mayors and police forces across Canada, have called for reforms in the criminal justice system.

Social justice advocates will argue for jail sentences and incarceration as harmful, they will sing you and I a sad song about trauma and how it leads people to a life of crime and if we only gave them a chance we could save them from their life of violence and crime. Social justice advocates will tell us that it’s not socially just to incarcerate people, that bail reform and lower sentences promote justice.

This morning

Brandon Robinson

wrote a post called Feeding the Fight. Please take the time to go read it.

Feeding The Fight

Brandon wrote about fighting a snake hidden in a bird’s nest that he allowed to stay on his front porch. The chicken snake was striking and swinging at Brandon, in some all out war. Writes Brandon, I realized that snake didn’t just slither into our lives without a reason. It came because I let the nest stay. Please go read that essay, it’s well worth your time, Brandon’s words exude wisdom for our time.

So, returning to the sickness plaguing our society. Reader, are we feeding our fight? Through this misguided version of social justice that includes harm reduction, enabling drug addiction and mental illness and violence, are we, fighting the snakes we are fighting?

How did we get to this point? How do we remedy the dangerous social sickness that’s destroying Vancouver? I don’t have the answer, and that’s not why I wrote this missive.

In Vancouver we are suffering in the aftermath of Kai-ji Adam Lo’s horrific mass murder at the April 26th Lapu Lapu street festival. Eleven people are dead and many families forever destroyed because we as a society “allowed the nest to stay”, inviting the snakes that swing at us and fight us.

A month before the Lapu Lapu massacre, Pivot Legal Society released this position paper on involuntary care.

I wonder if the activists at Pivot still believes what they wrote here. It’s known that the family of Adam Lo called the outpatient unit to report that Adam’s mental health had taken a dangerous turn for the worst and they worried about him and wanted him to get help. Lo was previously a psychiatry in patient, he suffered a severe crisis following the murder of his brother a year ago. His mother tried to take her life 6 months after her son’s murder. It’s a tragic story. And the family needed help that they didn’t receive, quite clearly.

In my community we have struggled with the possibility of having under house arrest the man who committed that violent assault of that Toronto woman on the Vancouver seawall, whilst on bail from assault domestic violence incident. People have lost work days because of the extreme anxiety that possibility has created in their lives. I just read that this man has been released into the Vancouver community. I have no idea if he’s gonna be serving his house arrest in my housing community, our local housing cooperative leadership seems impotent in the face of resident concerns and I really give up now, because no one cares about my safety and security nor that of the community itself, so I should stop fighting the futility of the situation.

I’m tired. And I wonder why women don’t matter to the social justice obsessed society. I wonder why we have to fight for our human dignity and why we are being slowly choked out of public life by the enabling of violent men in our supposedly social justice obsessed society.

Reader, why are social justice advocates feeding the snakes we are fighting? Why are social justice advocates feeding the habits that harm and devour us?

I don’t know anymore.