A Mother’s Lament - No Community, No Security

March 20 2008 by The Systemic Analyst.

The parents of a 14-year old Swift Current, Saskatchewan girl are bewildered and upset that members of the community who saw the girl outside at night with luggage didn’t alert the authorities. Speaking with the Edmonton Sun the mother said, “When you see a young girl like that in the middle of nowhere, standing on the side of the road with two suitcases and an old man is in the (cab), you don’t find it suspicious?” Her statements neatly sum up what is perhaps the biggest weakness in Canadian security - a lack of community involvement.

In fact, one might take this line of thought even further and speculate that the problem goes beyond a simple lack of involvement to an utter lack of community. There was a time, not so very long ago, in this country when individuals and families truly relied upon one another to get by in life. We were an agricultural society full of family farms. Bringing in the harvest or wood for winter meant co-operation. If something was amiss with one of the neighbours, someone would look in on him or her. Crime rates were low in a community where everyone knew one another. Not only does this familiarity breed a sense of conscience that prevents many would-be criminals from acting upon urges but identifying culprits was much easier. Moreover, given the interconnectedness of a community, behaviour that threatened the stability of the greater whole was not tolerated and thus dealt with in a timely, appropriate fashion.

Gradually a more centralized form of government crept into the Canadian countryside. Everything from rule of law to identification was taken up by a growing bureaucracy. Communities were encouraged to let officials do their bidding, putting more and more of the decision making around community issues into the hands of a few career-bureaucrats and politicians.  As a result, the average person became less engaged in community affairs and development. Apathy for the decision making process set in which was aggravated by the deterioration of community with the mass movement of Canadians from farms to towns.

With increasing taxes levied to support the decision-making government and a growing reliance on machinery, the Canadian farmer suddenly found much greater need for revenue than ever had been the case before. Farming, as opposed to a traditional means of existence (not to mention freedom which is why so many poor immigrants flooded into the country in the 19th century) for a family, became a business. Struggling to get by people began leaving the land for urban centres in search of a more profitable life.

As the rural population decreased, the government became less concerned with development in those areas and began a pattern of funding cuts that continue to this day. Governance and representation in rural environments was repeatedly consolidated, taking the bureaucracy ever further from those people who remained on farms. Hospitals and schools continue to close.  

The draining of rural populations into urban centres was really only completed in the 1970’s and 1980’s, although some areas were left deserted more quickly than others. (The final impetus that pushed the independent farmer off the land was the shift in agricultural production from family operations into industrial factory farms.) Individuals, such as the distraught mother or myself, still recall what it meant to be a part of a rural community.

The prevalent sense of community today in Canada is limited. An increasing majority of Canadians live in large towns or cities, where a sense of urban anonymity (urbanonymity, if you will) spawns considerable apathy. The sort of apathy which encourages taxi drivers to unquestioningly drive off with a young teenager and a perverse predator.  We live in a time and society where the modern man’s mantra is truly see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Not exactly a mindset conducive to increasing security or fostering communities.

Thus, the mother of this young girl lured out in the night by a predator is lamenting not just her daughter’s near brush with disaster but also the loss of a system that once prevented such threats from really existing in the first place.

Posted in Security Measures, North America | No Comments »