Roses and Thorns: Of community solidarity, racism and justice

ROSE: To the hundreds of people who braved a chilly November evening Sunday to stand up against racism in the wake of the Oct. 27 massacre of 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa. A vigil to show solidarity with the local Jewish community was held at St. Catharines city hall and included strong statements from various leaders, including B’nai Israel student rabbi Joshua Schwartz. If hatred is going to be defeated, said Schwartz, simply saying “never again” without taking action and leaning on “mealy-mouthed compromises” won’t work. Discrimination must be openly confronted, he said. Schwartz said in an interview, said that he understands people are experiencing fear while living in a political environment that is increasingly fuelled by anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric. But he stressed that people cannot give up. “We absolutely cannot give into nihilism. We cannot give into despair. We have to build as world of true justice.”

THORN: To assistant Crown attorney Greg Smith, for the insensitivity and lack of professionalism displayed in a line of questioning he followed with a Canadian customs officer during an August preliminary hearing into a drug case. Smith was trying to determine the movements of border services officer Duncan Small, and the defendant Jahrell Lungs along with three other black occupants of a car sent to secondary inspection. “OK. So you’re like an Oreo cookie,” said Smith to Small. “You’re the cream in the middle, basically …” Small, understandably, was unable to respond. The exchange caused laughter and consternation in the courtroom. “I had to compose myself to continue,” Lungs’ lawyer VJ Singh, said. Smith later apologized to the court but Lungs has complained to the Ontario Law Society over Smith’s words. The use of such racially charged language has no place in an Ontario courtroom and undermines the belief that the justice system is blind to race and economic status.

ROSE: To organizers and volunteers involved in annual communitywide food drives in Welland and Port Colborne this past weekend. In Port Colborne, the drive, held by the local Lions club, collected an estimated 13,500 kg of food on Saturday which goes to the Port Cares food bank. In Welland, the food drive, in its 26th year, delivers support to three local food banks including Open Arms Mission, the Hope Centre and the Salvation Army. While Welland food drive co-ordinator Monique Finley did not know the exact amount of food collected on Saturday, she did say that this year’s community response appeared strong. “The shelves were bare at our three main charities, and now they’re not,” she said. At Welland’s Open Arms Mission alone, 700 people receive food support on a monthly basis, 30 per cent of them children. In Port Colborne, 1,300 people are registered with the food bank and roughly 9,000 kg of non-perishable food is distributed to them monthly. Those numbers give a sense of the size of those cities’ poverty issues, and indeed the size of the problem regionwide — Port Colborne and Welland are not unique in this respect. The efforts of the literally hundreds of people who worked at these food drives — driving and collecting donated items from homes around the cities, and sorting food — and the thousands of residents who lent support by donating will make a difference as winter approaches. But more needs to be done regionwide to not only address the immediate effects of poverty, homelessness and so many other social ills, but to also address the fundamental causes of these ills, such as high unemployment, lack of mental health services and more.