Sunday, January 23, 2011

Gangs are Terrorists: More Outrageous Proposals (2)

Post 31—:

My question for this post is why gangs are not considered and treated as terrorists.

My dictionary defines a terrorist as one who engages in “the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion.” That seems simple and clear enough. For my purposes, I would probably drop the term “systematic” from the definition, for I doubt that gangsters do their shooting according to a systematic schedule, but they do according to a set of priorities that they may not have defined carefully—do gangsters define anything?—but by which they operate instinctively. Applying the word “instinctively” to gangsters seems to degrade them to animalistic levels, but that is not so far off the mark.

Do we need anything more? Since terrorism is an international problem, we should listen to the international political community. Unfortunately, it has not been able to reach agreement on a definition. Some experts have found over 100 definitions and, it appears, productivity and imagination are still cranking out more. The political community generally links terrorism to violence for political ends. That is not the case with gangs. They are not primarily politically inspired and I see no reason the definition should be exclusively political. One terrorism expert, Walter Laqueur, has concluded that the “only general characteristic generally agreed upon is that terrorism involves violence and the threat of violence.” That seems to come pretty close to the essence of gangs.

When you turn to the definition of gangs, especially the legal definition, you once again end up in the land of multiples. Alabama law has defined it more precisely than some as follows: a "street gang" is, "any combination, confederation, alliance, network, conspiracy, understanding, or similar arrangement in law or in fact, of three or more persons that, through its membership or through the agency of any member, engages in a course or pattern of criminal activity." That’s probably pretty good, except that it does not necessarily include violence. For my purposes I would like to take the Alabama version as my working definition of gangs with the addition of “frequent violence.”

But is it legitimate to subsume gangsterism under the umbrella of terrorism? Back in 1988, California enacted the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act. Since that time, at least 28 other states have enacted similar legislation. (Sorry, but I have not found parallel info about the Canadian situation. Perhaps I should try harder?) Here gangsterism is subsumed under “street terrorism.” So, my proposal to bring them together is not unheard of. I stand by it.

Why these thugs are not treated like terrorists and their organizations classified as terrorist organizations is beyond me. If they were, the gangs would be illegal and their bank accounts could be frozen. I am not a lawyer and so do not know whether simple membership in a terrorist organization is illegal in Canada, but in my opinion, it should be.

Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada explains what Canada should and/or is doing to counteract terrorism in this website: http://www.international.gc.ca/crime/terrorism-terrorisme.aspx. Check it out and see how much of it you think should or could be applied to gangs and gangsters. One of the things I fail to understand is the emphasis on the need for paying special attention to human rights in this framework, unless the reference is to the human rights of the targets.

In my humble opinion, gangs should be treated like terrorist organizations and gangsters like terrorists. Their organizations should be illegal as should membership in them, whether or not an individual member has personally committed any act of violence or not. Their assets should be seized and used to pay for the expenses of countering them.

I am not done yet with these monsters. In the meantime, I invite you readers to dialogue with me on this subject. Tell me where I am wrong. Insult me all you wish. But one thing I will not accept, namely to be told that the law, whether national or international, forbids the kinds of things I am suggesting. Law is becoming oppressive. It is increasingly used to protect terrorists and gangsters. That climate must be done away with. God is the ultimate law giver, but much of today’s positive law with respect to our subject goes counter to His law and has become a prison to the ordinary citizen. In the previous post I wrote about the need for revival. Well, positive law needs to be revived and refreshed to make it more hospitable to freedom and peace. In this process, our lawyers, these so-called “legal experts,” should be assigned a backseat and the “lay” citizen take control of the process.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Crime, Gangs and Secularism

Post 30—:

The past few years BC has had to live with a very lively gang regime that goes far beyond anything reasonable and kilometres beyond anything we should put up with. Shootings, killings, guns, drugs and every kind of violence and vice make up the picture. We are living in a reign of terror. Innocent neighbours, bystanders or passers by are getting shot. The police are doing the very best they can under the circumstances. In the process, they are spending fortunes on staff hours, finances and every resource at hand.

Acording to Kim Bolan and her colleague Daphne Bramham, both of the Vancouver Sun, the murder rate has been going down. Quite a number of gang leaders are behind bars, awaiting trial in the province. Others have been charged and convicted south of the border. So, the police are making serious progress and we ought to appreciate them for their efforts. I so do.

What to do about it? It is clear from letters to editors of local newspapers that the public is getting tired of all this violence and danger lurking all around us. Not a few argue for stiffer laws and stiffer sentences. They get terribly impatient with judges who to them appear to be overly lenient with these thugs and do more to protect their civil rights than the security of ordinary citizens.

Both Bolan and Bramham—see above—are among my favourite columnists around town, Bolan especially because of her crime beat. Bramham has a couple of general suggestions. “We need to act boldly,” is one of her recipes. Fair enough, but how, in which way? “We need to address the root causes” is another one of hers. You don’t know how often I have heard that advice in various community workshops discussing social ills around town. It has become a mantra among those dealing with the issue. Indeed, address the root causes, but I have noticed that people never get beyond pointing to just another level of underlying symptoms such as drugs and alcohol. But why are those causes so common? They are not causes; certainly no underlying causes; they are mere symptoms of something deeper that Vancouver does not want to address.

I have an idea that most people around Vancouver will regard as outrageous and even offensive. When I suggested it once to my table mates at one of these seminars, they looked at me with shock in their eyes. The whole table was quiet for some seconds. Then someone started another discussion—a blatantly diversionary tactic. No one wanted to address the basic cause I suggested. I picked on secularism as a basic cause. Yes, secularism. Since my statement constituted a direct challenge to the worldview of almost everybody around the table, they were not in a mood to accept the challenge and look at it. No surprise, really. Most people resist serious challenges to their worldview. That comes too close to home. That could make me partly responsible for the problems under discussion.

Why did I suggest secularism as a basic cause? Because secularism has replaced Christianity in Vancouver but only in a general way. Though Christianity was never perfectly practiced by anyone, it had provided a perspective with which people could handle and interpret the challenges life hurls at us. Secularism may have replaced it, but it is largely an empty frame of reference on which most people cannot build their life. It is a weak base on which to build a society. It gives a person no moral hold with any degree of imperative. It does not offer firm standards by which to conduct oneself. Everyone sets his own standard.

When a society recognizes no spiritual transcendent standards beyond itself that it it regards as sacred and inviolable, all too many people cave in to the process of lowering standards that is taking place in society. Parents have little or no firm guidance to bequeath to their kids and so the next generation lowers its standards even more, a generational cycle without end. All you have to do is compare the movies of 50 years ago with the current crop and you will immediately notice the difference. Same thing for fashions. What was considered sexy, shocking and avant garde then, is now blasé. What is common now, would have been highly offensive then. This process has been going on at almost all cultural fronts—marriage and divorce, abortion, free-lance sex of every kind, reduced sense of authority and respect. People have lost their sense of meaning. Many wander around on this planet with a feeling of emptiness and uselessness. So they find some sort of relief in alcohol and drugs; others in diversions like sport. Moral sensitivities have dulled and the challenges of an exciting gang life with money and power overcome many young people.

I am not suggesting that every secularist is a drifting clod in a sea of meaninglessness, open to every temptation that comes his way. I have several secularists as friends and they are the finest of people. They are Humanists in the best sense of the word with high morals and clear vision of right and wrong. They are guided by an elevated moral reason that largely keeps them on track, though they also espouse the horror of abortion. They are strong intellectuals who can mostly resist the situation described above, but the next generations?

Here, I believe, we have a major basic cause, one that is hard to overcome, that most of us cannot and do not even want to overcome. So, if we wait until we have overcome this basic cause, we will be paralyzed and achieve nothing, since we don’t want to overcome it.

Now you may think I have really gone cuckoo, I bet! Question secularism?! Get off the pot! But it’s actually nothing new. The latest challenge to secularism is postmodernism. But long prior to that, I am the product of a revival that challenged secularism and continues to do so, a wholesale revival across all cultural segments. It’s called the Kuyperian revival that started a century and a half ago and is still working and spreading its tentacles across the world. It has actually successfully challenged secularism at various fronts in Canada, in the courts, in education, in labour and in areas of social justice, but it has not dethroned it. While some of us pray and work towards such a revival, others of us should work on reducing the negative effects of the symptoms. Both need to happen, but in the next and other future posts I will concentrate on ways to reduce these negative effects, the symptoms.

In the next post I will begin to offer a suggestion or two about tackling the symptoms. These suggestions will likely be considered be equally outrageous by “experts.” In fact, one expert has already done so when I contacted her some time ago. As I occasionally get back to this subject, I will often ask you to think outside of our current boxes of political correctness. I am no expert on these subjects, but, judging from the results the “experts” have to show for so far, it may be the time for an open and blatant non-expert to throw his hat+ into the hopper and see if we can’t shake things loose a bit. In the meantime, if you haven’t done so yet, I urge you to check out this Kuyper and Kuyperian stuff I refer to occasionally, so you know what I am talking about. You can google and find plenty to chew on. You can also go to the Kuyperiana page on my website www.SocialTheology.com>.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Government Transparency (3—and last for now)

Post 29--:

I don’t want to keep flogging the same horse, dead or alive—the horse, that is. But I do want to report on some progress that is being made at the transparency front.

Transparency could be dangerous to our health. The decision in favour of transparency of the BC Ferries is a case in point. The recently released info about the outrageous annual income of its American CEO has upset many citizens, judging from letters to local newspapers. Some, including yours truly, are—well, let me not embarrass my family with Vancouver’s favourite street vocabulary—blooming angry, especially as they learn of additional charges and reduced services to pay the pigs at the trough. Over a million p.a., according to a caption under the man’s picture in the Vancouver Sun (Dec. 27, 2010, p. A14). As I read angry letters, my own anger rose right along with them. Not good for my high blood pressure!

It would be nice if this public outcry would cause shame among the pigs at the trough. I must admit I doubt that. Corporate pigs have been exposed much since the beginning of the current economic crunch, but I have not heard of any public repentance or confession. They themselves and their lackies continue to argue that in order to get highly qualified people, they have to be paid “market prices.” That is, as high as they dare to make it. They won’t do it for less. Have these people heard how they describe themselves? They seem to be incapable of shame and beyond embarrassment. Let me address them in the second person directly: Do you realize how extremely egoistic and materialistic you sound? Listen to yourself, man! I can’t imagine! How can you live with yourself?

If you pigs are enjoying your trough too much to listen, perhaps the public anger will make the authorities in government a bit more careful in future doling out their largesse by thinning what goes into that trough.

I love the work of Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF). They are on the ball and provide taxpayers with lots of great info. I enjoy their work and thank them for it. They push hard for financial transparency. Nevertheless, at the end of this post, I will critique them. But first, the positive, the progress that their Federal Director, Kevin Goudet, writes about in the Vancouver Sun (Dec. 22, 2010, p. A15).

One item that gladdens my heart is that Kelly Block, a Member of Parliament (MP) from Saskatchewan, has sponsored a bill “for transparency of reserve remuneration for chiefs and council.” The idea is to “put reserve politicians’ pay online”! I love the unintended pun—online vs “on the line” “Even the Assembly of First Nations has buckled to the pressure and is now promising to make this information public.” Wow! That’s big news! Rumours have it that some chiefs of small bands make as much or more than the Premier of the province they live in! If you compare that to the squalor in which many members of these bands live, then such incomes place these chiefs also among the pigs at the trough. So, this new development could mean significant progress in terms of transparency, though you never know, for promises and new laws often end up as mere smoke screens.

The second item reported by Gaudet is that, due to pressures from various quarters, the Auditor General of the Federation is going to “be allowed to look at the books of MPs and Senators. The voices were heard, sense prevailed and the books will be audited.” Having read about some of the high expenses these “servants of the people” incur, seemingly without real worries about the welfare of the people or sense of responsibilities towards them, I am very happy to learn of this development.

But I cannot suppress the question how it could be that the Auditor General of the entire Federation of all people needed such special permission! How did it develop that that high office did not have access naturally, automatically to this info? I am stunned. But I’m also happy. The next step is for that info also to be accessible to the general public. Canadian transparency ain’t what it should be by a long shot. I believe a party that makes this a major component of their platform and acts upon it, will be honoured by the people. For transparency goes along with a cluster of attitudes that together spell “democracy,” something of which Canada has a serious deficit between elections, what with Prime Ministers and Premiers acting like tribal chiefs.

I did promise you a word of critique of CTF or, at least, of its Federal Director. His closing paragraph starts with this sentence: “Undoubtedly the list of all the things governments did wrong this past year would dwarf this list of things done right.” That comment, Mr. Goudet, is unbecoming of someone of your stature. “All the things” our governments—note his plural—do are amazing in keeping this country going, from the smallest details of city curbs and sewage you seldom see, through providing health care and security for all, to representing the country on the international scene. Canada is admired by the international community for the way she negotiated her way through the global economic crisis. To negate all that by a flippant condemnation as mostly wrong is nothing short of irresponsible. You owe all the governments and their civil servants in Canada a serious apology and all the people an explanation. Yes, transparency please. Yours is a low blow.

I would refer you to the National House of Prayer (NHP)in Ottawa, an organization that teaches serious politically impartial prayer support for Canadian government ( www.nhop.ca ). Perhaps they can help you develop a more serious, wholesome and responsible attitude. Christians critique, yes, as I do here, but they also support the governments of the day with respect and prayer. There, that’s the Calvinist in me peeping out, referring you to an NHP operated by a Baptist. John Calvin could be shocked! Probably surprised. Most likely pleased.