SEPTEMBER 2004
by Barry Stagg
At the stop beside the video store, an elderly woman laboured up the steps of the older bus. She could have used the kneeling function featured on some of the new and very expensive models in the TTC fleet. In any event, the lady with the black dress and a shopping cart got aboard and stood there, visibly tiring in the early heat of August. Not a soul moved to offer her a seat at the front.
She paused and in her inscrutable way seemed nevertheless annoyed but then she shuffled on down to the back of the bus, brushing her shopping cart against the shoes of the young man dialling his cell phone.
"Watch it", yelped the prince of electronic vapidity as he indignantly drew his foot back from the cart's soiled wheels. "Really get awake now, granny," he sneered as the bus lurched forward.
The woman did not hear the rebuke or at least ignored it as she found a seat next to the man with the plastic bags. She dragged and scraped her cart in beside her and folded her hands, a stoic in transit.
The story could end here or go on to further lambast the overall lack of courtesy and civility among the able- bodied travelling public of Toronto. Instead, the tale will segue to the highest possible heights of media attention in America on this day, August 31, 2004. The Republican Convention is on in New York City. Those who sit smugly at the front of the bus in the city on the north side of Lake Ontario need to take notice.
Canada has not distinguished itself in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Too many Canadians have the vacuity of the young protester who got across the border to represent her sliver of Canada at the anti-Bush demonstrations in New York. "President Bush is just a big bully," was her submission to the networks and perhaps to the posterity of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.
When the bus moves along its route in Toronto, it picks up so many of the young and entitled, the glib practitioners of me-first social politics. President George Bush, the leader of the Western World, the man who led the reprisals against the vicious Islamist mass murderers is just a thug, according to these cosseted children of Toronto.
George Orwell is often credited with this pithy statement:"We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."
The real bullies these days are those such as the vain and narcissistic practitioners of self-absorption who live in their hothouse enclaves in mercantilist cities like Toronto. They cannot rouse themselves to give a seat on a bus to a frail old lady nor see the obvious menace of the terrorists so resolutely fought by the Americans led by George W. Bush. Only a final Orwell quote will suffice to sum up the malady encountered:"To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."
The juvenile neutralists of this country, some well beyond the chronology of youth, should carefully consider another Orwellian aphorism:"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me."
The present battle against the feral terrorists who perpetuated the mass homicides of September 11, 2001 continues, using the sublime insight of George Orwell and registering the banalities of a day on the bus in Toronto. The fickle and the queasy need to take notice of the barbarity punished and accept that rough and revenging attacks are the only certain way to make our world safe. There is little room for nuance in this battle.
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