The World is a Dangerous Place

Sunday, 7 August 2011

The World Is a Dangerous Place - Crime in Canada - Minister Rob Nicholson Stole My Faith

(Blogger, American in the first place, has made me post this _twice_, and will not let me retract.  Irony, anyone?)

Do most people lie awake at nights thinking of crime?

I was sitting here in the early morning hearing a news report on the radio about how in New Zealand they were deciding to criminalize all kinds of formerly legal substances.  My first thought was: you sure don’t hear much about New Zealand, and how is it that this story is a _story_?  Dog days of August, nothing for the media to do, maybe.

I remembered the words of a British statesman, or maybe politician, who noted that prison is a place where they put bad people to make them worse.  I thought about my own country, Canada, where our hard-right ideologically driven government is whipping up, hand in glove with the right-wing media that funds the government, fears about crime.

Whenever credible authorities point out that crime has been going down, reactionary governments say crime hasn’t been going down, and the media (here in Canada, CTV, both supports and engenders such governments).  I’m just one person, and I’m neither ancient nor juvenile, but I *would* have to say that, in my lifetime, crime has become something I have thought and worried less and less about.  My life does reflect the general trend.  When I think about my life as I’ve lived it in this country, with increasing multiculturalism and immigration and so on, it is as plain as the nose on my face that the instances of crimes of all types have, indeed, gone down.  Crimes still happen everywhere all the time, but crimes are nowhere near what used to be routine when I was growing up.  Tea party conservatives who want to base everything on their own private imaginations, take note: I've got a private notion, too, and it's practical, not made-up.

[Ok, it’s sad that I have to do this.  Yes, my family was victimized by crime twice, the last time in the early 80s.  In the early 2000s, I was a victim of some fairly serious vandalism.  So duh, I know what crime is and I know what it’s like to experience it.  No, I haven’t been shot or raped, but I’ve got a funny funny hunch that I do indeed know one hell of a lot more about being a victim of crime than those who are most ardent about getting bad guys they’ve only seen on tv.]

And I think most people understand this.  One might say, well, reactionary governments play to their bases by whipping up crime frenzy notions and so on.  But I actually don’t even believe that the base is there on this issue.  I actually think seniors, say, are much less worried about crime where I live than they used to be—and this despite constant media reports (my main newshour tv broadcast begins, significantly, with the sound of a police siren—that’s taking “if it bleeds it leads” to a new level of reification—the CTV newshour is basically saying “look, our intro. is a police siren—if there’s no cop crime stories, we haven’t got anything to talk about and you’ll get a test pattern for the next 60 minutes) that they ought to be. 

What I’m suggesting is that, in tandem with declining voter participation and so forth is an increasingly tight nexus between reactionary governments and concentrated global media—the people must be convinced that the world is a terrible and dangerous place, and reactionary governments and the media who fund them (and the governments who fund them in return through broadcasting regulations) must do the convincing.  You might say, “well, it’s the people who elect the governments, so if people are concerned about crime, then it must be a real issue.”  But of course, it isn’t.  Almost no-one votes anymore, and when the fraction who do vote do vote, they vote in response to brief emotional campaigns that essentially only enrich the representatives who get to sit around for the next number of years working not on voter issues, but on attack ads on how to get re-elected and ensure their pensions they get after a few years, unlike most people; fixed voting dates of course only exacerbate this situation (for concerned voters) and only assist the media (Fox, CTV, Sun) who benefit from government largesse in enabling them to turn elections into a kind of 1-2 year reality show.

In short (sorry, sorry), my point is simply this.  Crime is not getting worse, unless the government encourages it by encouraging a wild-wild west Alberta format in which anything goes and drug cartels from literally all over move in, as they have, to take advantage of the unchecked, unregulated, untaxed money-spinning regime.  You have to create a sense of crisis where none exists, so the government, along with the media (as Cameron and Murdoch have so amply shown, back entrances and front), creates one.

And the funny thing undeniably is that, in pretending to fight crime, reactionary governments of course increase it as much as they can—they create economic bubbles, regional hotspots, tax-free havens, gluts of non-citizen workers, and so on and so on.  They create the problems they pretend to combat, and thus sustain themselves.  Most people—anywhere—understand this, but they are drugged and swayed by the media that supports the government.  It’s like cheering for a soccer/football team full of bazillionaire coke-snorting media-baron owned stateless 1-yr foreign contract strikers; doing it is irresistible, and you know you shouldn’t, but just for the tiny glow it gives you on the few occasions a win provides you a faint vicarious sense of being loved in return, you do it. 

As night follows day.

The world is basically a safe place.  If any politician tries to tell you otherwise, ask yourself—have I been a victim of crime lately?  And if I have, what role has my government played in it?  Has it promised to lock up every toking 15-yr-old and throw away the key at a cost of hundreds of thousands of my own money?  Or has it said, “look, let’s teach these people some skills,” or has it said, “look, we’ve got to stop a situation by which anyone we give special access to can just come in here and make millions of dollars on a resource economy and then do what millions of untaxed dollars tend to do—end up in organized crime,” or has it said, “hey, guns have a funny way of killing people, and they keep doing it, so what about if we started trying to remove guns that inspire pretty well any violent crime you can think of?”

As for things such as rape and child porn, well, you just have to ask your politicians, do you want to create a society of gun-toting ex-cons ripe n’ ready through reactionary policies to do their very worst, or do you want just to sentence those people toughly and with tough conditions—why hand them guns when they get out?  Let them live in unrepressive, egalitarian, family-valued (that is, families of any kind--if you really value families, and their values, you will value families, pure stop) societies that don’t find violence acceptable, and maybe there will be a few fewer of such individuals.

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