Rocket Talk: Can Sunday Subway Service Start Sooner?
Newsstand: November 19, 2009
Gender Studies Coming to a High School Near You
Please Insert Station and Try Again
The Art of Not Knowing
Even on a street as gaudy, inconsistent, and ugly as Yonge, the Brass Rail has always felt out of place. Bordered by Ginger on one side and Kitchen Stuff Plus on the other, the building's façade eschews subtlety: unflattering snapshots of women in bikinis––the focus squarely on breasts and torsos––cover the exterior of the building, while an LED marquee scrolls the latest club news past (there's always something about "Porn Star Nikki Benz"), and signs advertise the possibility for "sensual encounter[s]." The whole thing shouts sex while being as decidedly unsexy as possible.
In the week after John O'Keefe was shot as he walked back from the Duke of Gloucester past the strip club, flowers and cards have slowly accumulated beside its entrance. Their new presence and the heavy emotional meaning they carry with them serves as another strange contrast for a building that is already characterized by strange contrasts: later on on the same day that a man walking by glances at the flowers and makes the Sign of the Cross across his chest, an announcer will boom from inside the club, "Alright, up next for you guys...Alexa," the sound bouncing out into the street where taxis and Hummer limos linger.
Last weekend's shooting was shocking not just because of its location and its senselessness but its victim: John O'Keefe is people like us––someone completely and utterly innocent, interested not in violence but in doing things like teaching his son about the environment––and his murder doesn't allow us to psychologically (and, for many, geographically) distance ourselves in the way that an anonymous gang-related shooting would. O'Keefe's death is not proof that Toronto is suddenly no longer a safe city (though Hou Chang Mao's death on Thursday certainly hasn't made it feel safer), but, like all bad things that happen to people like us, it forces us to engage in dialogue about the issue. There is no single solution (better gun control! tougher prison sentences! capital punishment!), and the solutions that will actually do most to improve the problem (sweeping social changes!) are, as always, the toughest ones to make work. But at least we're talking again, and if we're able to do so rationally, without fear, and with the aim of curbing all gun violence in the city and not just the violence that affects people like us, we'll be a better city for it.
Outside the Brass Rail, the Hummer limos still come and go. The men who get off don't pay much attention to the flowers and the cards, but that's not important; what's important is that we do.
Photo by Miles Storey.
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I'm not feeling the 'people like us' talk. and the quick inclusion of '...all gun violence' in at the end, doesn't excuse it.
a bit more clarity into whom 'people like us' are, and why we're so indifferent to 'people like them' getting killed, would certainly go a long way in this ongoing conversation.
"distance ourselves in the way that an anonymous gang-related shooting would."
So if a white liberal gets shot we have more empathy for them but if an "anonymous" kid from the projects does "we" have none?
I don't really get what you're trying to say here, David Topping, and while this post is heartfelt, it seems a little lacking in judgement.
Now i will wait for an email and a post deletion.
I would hardly call Hou Chang Mao a "white liberal." This city does care when a "kid from the projects" is killed, witness the reaction to the Jordan Manners killing this past summer. We just don't care when it's criminals killing criminals.
Topping's talking about people who are killed because they are already involved in criminal networks. Of the 82 murders in Toronto this past year, only three victims were considered uninvolved bystanders.
yeah im going to have to agree with matty and ronotoe,
where was this article, this outpour of opinions and dialogue, (david miller trying to ban legal handguns , which is ridiculous and obviously political) when we almost beat the record for murders last year?
jane creba all over again.
Where's that 4.5 Topping heads photo when you need it? ;)
"People like us" immediately made me respond "what, white?" Hou Chang Mao is a footnote in this article, but it was John O'Keefe's death that inspired it.
Where is Hou Chang Mao's makeshift memorial?
i am feeling the "people like us" talk - i am not involved in a gang.
i walk around in public in toronto with utmost certainty that i will not be the victim of a random homicide, and i think it is irresponsible for the media, especially the Sun, to publish huge headlines about murders. such sensationalism makes people believe toronto isn't safe, which in turn leads them to live in fear. it erodes the general feeling of well-being that makes toronto so great, without contributing anything besides some kind of modern "public shaming" of the offender.
i think it would be a serious stretch of the imagination to call gun violence in toronto a major problem.
"unflattering snapshots of women in bikinis––the focus squarely on breasts and torsos––cover the exterior of the building,"
===========
And some of those snapshots remain warped and singed after a rooftop fire almost literalized the "topless bar" concept...
Anybody who`s not a criminal is "people like us".
When I first heard about the shooting outside the Brass Rail, I incorrectly assumed it was between patrons of the bar and/or bouncers(s). I chalked it up to more good reasons not to go to strip bars or become a bouncer. When I found out it was just a guy walking by, it became something I could relate to more, even before I learned his ethnicity, age, etc. Anybody who`s grown up in the Toronto area has probably walked on Yonge Street countless times, so we may relate to it more. If you were to read about two equally horrific car accidents, you may feel stronger about the one that occurs on a street you regularly travel on.
When I read about Hou Chang Mau, I remembered that I`d been walking in that same neighbourhood the day before at about the same time, and that made me somehow feel closer to it, despite not living in that part of Toronto.
I`ll live with the questionable headlines so long as we never become a city where murders are so common we barely even notice.
Almost forgot, there`s a memorial for Hou Chang Mau at the site where he fell, may he and John O`Keefe rest in peace.
Yeah, DaveH, cause everyone that goes to a strip club is a criminal.
I'm pretty sure I've bought groceries at Hou Chang Mau's store. If I'm right, it's on a pretty busy
corner. They pull this shit in public and they can't even shoot straight.
What's the deal with fuckup would-be gangsters in Toronto, exactly? Is there no adult supervision in organized crime, any more? These junior geniuses should look up a few Quebec bikers and ask 'em how killing the occasional passer-by is likely to affect their prospects.
(Apologies that it's taken so long to reply to the comments on this thread.)
I should clarify (and also, uh, not clarify) the meaning of "people like us." In my mind, it's whatever you want it to be: it could be based on race, class, age, sex, location, innocence, and pretty much any other category. That's not to say it should be based on any of those things, but it is––for many people, "people like us" includes people like Aqsa Parvez; for many others, it excludes her. (I've talked about the treatment of her and her family as the "other" [the people not like us] before.)
Through "people like us," people narrow what kind of crime affects them; otherwise, all crime, world-wide, would be devastating. For a huge amount of people, if it happens up the block to someone you see as being similar to yourself it's vastly different than when it happens in England or the States.
My switch to arguing that we should move away from "people like us" is based on something that comes up again and again, which is that fundamentally everyone is people like us. Toronto gang members aren't inhuman. We can pretend that they are, but they aren't––I think that they're made, not born. That's why fixing this problem isn't a matter of band-aids like gun control or tougher prison sentences.