My Son and I Were Accosted By a Couple of Assholes and It Feels Like Civil Society is Collapsing
Dangerous incidents that didn’t used to happen are becoming commonplace
I live in Toronto, which has always been a civilized place plus or minus the stupid traffic and a surfeit of ugly condos.
But the social fabric became stretched and frayed during the pandemic, and it’s never recovered. The city is less friendly, less civil, and more dangerous.
In my neighbourhood, shit that didn’t used to happen at all is becoming commonplace.
Yesterday I had an unsettling encounter as I was walking my ten-year-old son Conall back from his nature camp at High Park.
We had just left the park on Bloor Street when we saw two helmeted dudes on motorized bikes blasting up the grassy footpath that runs beside the sidewalk.
A moment later they reach us and stop. The closer guy — a white dude in his twenties with a terrible complexion and crazy eyes — looks at me and says, “Whassup, bro?”
I was puzzled, so I took off my sunglasses and said “I dunno, you’re asking me.”
He sticks out his hand. “Shake, bro” (all of his sentences ended with, or were at least punctuated with, the word “bro.”) I reached out and shook, applying a firm, even pressure because you only get one chance to make a first impression.
“Whassup, bro?” I said. This is called mirroring, and anyway the phrase seemed to summarize our burgeoning relationship nicely.
“You shook your head, bro,” he said, implying that I’d looked at him and his pal in some kind of askance way. I probably had, because they were douchebags, but it hadn’t even registered.
I didn’t want to have a conversation about it. I summoned up an accent and attitude from childhood summers in my New Jersey motherland, and growled in my best Snake Pliskin voice, “I’m talkin’ to my son here, pal.”
Possibly my demeanour was rendered more intimidating by the ketchup stains around my mouth and the streetfighter’s mark of an absent front tooth. Regardless, he didn’t reply but he and his friend both gunned their little e-engines and rode off.
When they’d travelled about ten yards, Mr. Sociable shouted “We’re doing coke”, twice — which seemed an odd flex — and exited my life, hopefully forever.
As we walked home, I told Conall the two men weren’t a threat, but he was understandably spooked and asked if I could buy him a shotgun. When I said no, he told me that as soon as he was eighteen he’d get one for himself.
Sure, it’s an anecdote, but it’s no one-off. Anyone who takes the subway in Toronto has similar stories to tell. The supermarket near me has a security guard for the first time ever, and the phone stores make you ring a doorbell to get in.
This isn’t the same city I moved to thirty-odd years ago or even the one I lived in five years ago. It’s less civil and more dangerous, even on a sunny day with lots of people around. And from what I hear, it’s not just Toronto.
Much of it has to do with homelessness, substance abuse and mental illness, and maybe more addiction programs and social workers will help. Maybe. If so, I hope that money can be found for them.
But the mood I’m in right now, the shotgun solution doesn’t look all that bad.