Some of the 97%

Who said that today’s youngsters are wild, unruly and mostly delinquents?  Granted, 3% of them are.  Today I wish to feature a few of the 97% that we never hear about.

Thursday last, the wife and I attended a spaghetti dinner held for the benefit of a Haitian school being rebuilt after that horrible earthquake.  That school, for the last 17 years has been supported by The Haiti-Laurentides Committee of l’École Secondaire Augustin-Norbert-Morin, in Ste-Adèle, about 60 kilometers North-West of Montreal in the Laurentian mountains.

Students helped by a dedicated teacher are the Committee members, volunteers and organizers.  That evening, about 80 of them were the ticket vendors, waiters, bus boys, etc.  They were without adult supervision since the school board has cut the job of the person supervising after school activities.  Everything went very smoothly and we enjoyed very good spaghetti and a splendid evening.

In Montreal where college and university students are on strike to protest a decreed tuition hike, they have been marching most days and evenings.  Their marches were infiltrated with that despicable group called the Blackbloc, vandals dressed in black and wearing masks who highjack any kind of street manifestation, save for religious processions, and wreak havoc.

At first, most student demonstrators walked away when violence began.  For the last three days they have been opposing the Blackblocers and even helping the police to catch and arrest them.

We may not agree with the student strike and its cause, but we have to acknowledge that, in an orderly way, our young ones are standing for their rights, or perceived rights, and are rejecting the scums that pretend to sympathise with them but are only doing a disservice to their cause.

Look around attentively and you will see that our young ones do not deserve the reputation that sensationalist media are foisting upon them.

Occupy highjacking

Our Montreal Square Victoria occupiers are going through a tough questioning period.  They realize that their site is being taken over by homeless people, psychiatric cases, junkies and dealers.  Their own order service can not cope anymore and they appreciate the help from the police and firemen who have been collaborating with them since the beginning.
Last night some of the very first Occupiers went home saying they were exhausted by the "social work" they had to spend their days doing.  The fact is that social work without proper training is exhausting and even dangerous.
The Occupiers were hospitable, fed the vagrants and even sheltered them.  Unfortunately they failed to fathom the exploitative capacity of some of those guys and they are paying the price.
As a first step they have now stopped giving food to people who can not prove that they are doing their bit on the site.  Nights could prove more problematic though.  Let's hope they will solve their problems and that the movement will not be destoyed from the interior by the parasites it has attracted.

About integration.

L’Importé

(Paul Costopoulos, mardi, 26 janvier 2010)

Les espoirs de 1945 étaient, pour la première fois, regroupés dans la salle d’étude d’Éléments-Syntaxe-Méthode.  Le supérieur du collège leur souhaitait la bienvenue soulignant leur chance d’avoir été choisis parmi les fils de la classe ouvrière pour appartenir aux élites de demain.  Fondé en 1933, le collège avait pour mission de donner accès aux fils de familles moins fortunées au cours classique  porte d’entrée privilégiée des hautes sphères intellectuelles, sociales, religieuses et politiques (le monde des affaires? Pas dans le portrait).

Étrennant ces bancs et les réchauffant pour les trois prochaines années, cent un garçons avaient hâte qu’il finisse pour aller explorer ce nouvel univers.  Tous, sauf trois, provenaient de familles supposément pure-laine.  Ces trois avaient une mère canadienne-française (c’est comme ça qu’on disait dans le temps) mais des pères immigrants syrien, ukrainien et grec.  Un quatrième ne s’en vantait pas mais son nom français cachait une mère américaine et une langue maternelle anglaise; il se fondait donc dans la masse.

Bientôt le racisme montra le bout de son nez.  Tout d’abord, on les ignora ces trois importés.  Puis des petites remarques du genre : « D’où tu viens? »  Plus subtile encore : « Quand tu retournes chez-vous? »  Un peu plus agressif : « Ton père vole les jobs de nos pères! »  Un jour, à la cafétéria, le grec demande qu’on lui passe le sucre, S.V.P., avec un air de dédain, son vis-à-vis, R.V., lui dit : « J’ai pas à passer le sucre à un maudit grec comme toé ».  Avec une agilité et une énergie qu’il s’ignorait, en une fraction de seconde, le 

« maudit grec » avait sauté par-dessus la table et tenait le pure-laine à la gorge.  Il fallut six paires de mains et un professeur pour lui faire lâcher la boule de laine affalée inconsciente sur le plancher.

Explications fournies, enquête complétée, R.V. eût une retenue de deux heures le jeudi suivant, le grec fut sérieusement averti de ne plus recommencer.  Il s’en suivit une trêve, mais pas la paix.  Les succès du grec faisaient grincer des dents et la place qu’il prenait dans les activités extracurriculaires portait ombrage à ceux qui se croyaient, du droit du premier occupant, seuls à devoir accéder aux responsabilités d’organisation.  Un jour, un de ses rares alliés l’avisa qu’un groupe se préparait à le mettre à sa place le mardi midi suivant.  Mardi et jeudi après-midi, congé, les gars s’attardaient souvent autour du collège.  Ce mardi matin, le grec remit au supérieur du collège une enveloppe cachetée.  Il mit le supérieur au courant de ce qui se préparait et lui demanda, s’il lui arrivait quelque chose d’ouvrir la lettre, sinon qu’il la détruise.

Ce midi-là, près de l’église St-Alphonse, le grec se trouva cerné par une quinzaine de gars, dont le syrien, sans se démonter il leur laissa savoir qu’une enveloppe contenant tous leurs noms étaient entre les mains du supérieur et il leur dit : « Maintenant faites ce que vous voudrez, moi, je ne bouge pas ».  À ce moment précis, un hasard?, un prof passa par là et demanda si tout allait bien.  Le groupe se dispersa aussitôt.  Pour le reste de son cours, le grec, s’il ne fut pas universellement aimé fut, à tout le moins, craint et respecté.

Where is the North?

When I was a child and a teen, Québec was a simpler place. You were white, save if you were a porter at one of our train or bus stations or a chinese restaurant or laundry operator. You were Catholic or Protestant, French or English speaking. Well there were some in betweens, like me for instance. For us, the going could be tough...but if you had some resiliency you could soldier on and even make a place for yourself. You knew the Union nationale blue (Québec name for the conservative religious right--most Québecers), or Liberal red (the bad anticlerical left, a discredited minority that went out only in daytime). The Bishops and priests at election time warned us that the sky was blue but hell was red.
Then came 1960. The so-called Quiet Revolution saw the dreaded Liberals elected to form the next government. Things began changing. Electricity was nationalized. Schools, hospitals and social services were nationalized. Then immigrants started pouring in and the churches emptied although the two are not linked. Everything went very fast...and suddenly the Separatists came out of the woodwork and, in 1972 we had a Péquiste government.
T'was then that things got blurred. You had politicians switching sides and allegiance, people calling themselves Catholic or Protestant and not worshipping anymore. The head of the federal Conservative became the Liberal Prime Minister. The former president of the Liberal Youths became head of the A.D.Q. (Conservative party in disguise). A Liberal Minister created the Parti Québécois, and a Federal Conservative Minister created the Bloc Québécois...of Socialist leaning.
Then we had two referenda on sovereignty with questions so obscure that only a theologian could make heads or tails of them, and both with rather inconclusive results. We are still wondering who really won the last one.
These days no one really seems to know who is who and where all that will lead us. Got any idea where the North is?