Murder is foul wherever it lands

There was no imaginary line of wickedness crossed by a killing at a funeral in a church.

If such boundaries of conscience exist, they were breached the first time a young man crooked his finger around the trigger of a handgun and pulled: At a community centre, in a crowded dance club, on a busy street, in all the neighbourhoods where 48 gun homicides have occurred in Toronto in the past 10 months. What makes a “ House of God” any more sacrosanct as a preserve of the second commandment: Thou shalt not kill?

In Latin America, priests are slain at the altar while conducting mass. In Iraq, suicide bombers target mosques for the purpose of taking as many lives as possible — while the vulnerable faithful worship, even as they pray to Allah for deliverance from all this bloodshed. The mayor got it wrong and so did the police chief and so did the pastor who thundered from the of bail and detention. pulpit on Saturday, addressing a

Little crimes beget big crimes. congregation that had been

How casual murder has become, forced out of its Seventh Day Adventist how cheapened an individual’s temple, still a formal life. crime scene following the targeted

The motivation for gangland murder on Friday of 18- yearold

murder is appallingly thin — not Amon Beckles.

even, any longer, arising from

It’s no more grievous a sin because

turf wars over drug and weapons young Beckles was felled

distribution but from a ruinous by bullets outside a Rexdale

pathology, a moral abyss into church where he’d come to

which rush headlong small men mourn another young man slain

with hefty guns, venom spewing a week earlier; had, in fact, been

over perceived disrespect, fear of with that other victim when he

finking, the breast- beating of urban too had been shot and killed. savages, a lost generation.

Despicable? No more so than all

That cold- hearted gangsta code the other murders of, primarily,

or reprisal homicide has bled young black men. By, primarily,

down into a wider swath of the other young black men. Although

social fabric so that now even it is unfair to toss out so

those who aren’t involved in gang sweeping a racial profile — the

activity — and investigators say constituency of shooters and victims

they have no information that is more narrowly defined,

Beckles or his murdered friend, by cultural and ethnic factors, by

Jamal Hemmings, were gangedup, ancestral derivation, by the iconography though both were, in the vernacular, of manhood as it is promoted “ known to police” — are within a bang- bang ethos,

dispatched in pseudo- gang style, by teenagers who go to their premature

pop- pop- pop at a funeral. graves leaving behind yet

They didn’t get that way, these another generation of children

ruthless and morally barren killers without fathers, the issue of multiple — demonism personified, the baby mothers.

pastor charged, as if the devil Go to remand court any day of

made them do it — because there the week. See the pretty young

was no basketball court in the mommies with their beautiful

community, nor because they babies and the young men they

grew up listening to the lyrics of are there to support, their familiarity

rap music that glorifies violence, with the up- and- down process

where girls are bitches and power is wielded at the point of a gun.

Every society has its substrata, a counterculture that sneers at the values promoted by the majority. It is facile to blame disenfranchisement, everything the greater we haven’t done to steer a tiny minority away from crime, youths and young men who are little more than psychologically stunted children themselves, drifting towards the embrace of a jacked-up gang collective that grows exponentially larger — and more fractious, more inter- disputatious by the day. No matter how dire the circumstances in which these youths are raised, the overwhelming majority do not become gang- bangers, not even pretenders. They get on with their lives, as most people do, all those among us who didn’t grow up with wealth and social stature and a banquet of opportunities; who worked hard for the money and the education and a future worth living for, even if that grown- up place was modest in expectation.

All is vanity to gangbangers and those who emulate them, with the ‘ do-rags and the jailhouse pants and the street argot and the foul niggah talk and the wanton impregnating of teenage girls doomed to raise offspring on the weary backs of grandparents, youngsters who will have only a fleeting familiarity with their minimally present fathers. Blame the schools. Blame the cops. Blame the courts. But blame yourselves too because the seeds of bitterness and defiance

are implanted in the

family.

Boys, too often themselves without fathers,

watch their mothers go to work, go to church, struggle to put food on the table. But they want more than food and shelter and the unconditional love nearly all mothers give their kids. They want the glittery things that a consumer culture pushes on them, and they want them the easy way. They want the warped esteem exuded by boy- men who strut, with a revolver shoved down the front of their trousers. They want the perverse equalization of authority in a world where they are encouraged to believe themselves at war with the dominant culture — the power dynamics shared by a posse with its own code of ethics, with disastrous rules of conduct that result in titfortat homicide. It’s a bizarre twist on entitlement — the just deserts of the street.

There is too much hand- wringing over what put the violence in a young man’s eyes and not enough on the havoc they cause, the bodies piling up, the weeping of bereft mothers.

Screeching at police for failing to provide protection at a homicide victim’s funeral, yet tacitly demonizing those cops, closing ranks, creating an incubated environment where witnesses to violence are discouraged from coming forward. Beckles was interviewed by police about Hemmings’ murder, but his information was reportedly inaccurate. The pastor conducting the funeral service for Hemmings admitted to the Star he knew some mourners were “ packing” when they attended the church, and he failed to summon police, despite his apprehensions. A teenager was murdered outside a church, while attending the funeral of another teenager who never went to church. But it’s not about the church. And this isn’t a time to proselytize. The finger of God didn’t pull that trigger. Rosie DiManno appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.