I hope this doesn’t sound like one of those “get off my lawn” columns. It’s really not meant to be.
But I’m noticing far too often these days that some of the civility many of us took for granted decades ago simply doesn’t exist anymore.
Yes, I’m seeing a lot more homeless people sleeping on subway cars. Yes, I’m confronted daily by the struggles of people with addictions or mental-health issues. But they’re not the ones I’m talking about.
I’m talking about groups of students on Toronto subway cars talking to one another at the top of their lungs and hurling F-bombs with no regard for anyone else in their surroundings.
I’m referring to men (and it’s always men) walking down the street and spitting, not in the gutter, but in the middle of the sidewalk.
Not too long ago, I was waiting in a long lineup for a train at Union Station in Toronto. The young man in the lineup behind me had a boom box and was playing loud music for everyone to hear. It was 7 o’clock in the morning.
Who does that?
The most disturbing example I’ve recently heard about happened to a friend of mine who used to be a producer on The Agenda. His name is Wodek Szemberg, and he’s 73 years old. He was on a packed streetcar in midtown Toronto not long ago — earbuds in, reading a book — when two apparently inebriated young men nearby were talking far too loudly, considering the circumstances.
I’ve known Wodek for 30 years, and he’s never been the type to look down at his shoes (as pretty much all the rest of us do) when confronted by public incivility. So, by his own admission, he told the young men to “shut the f**k up.”
“This is a public space, and this kind of behaviour is unbecoming,” he told them.
“They seemed unhappy that I tried to teach them some manners,” he says.
(Courtesy of Wodek Szemberg)
Coincidentally, the two young men and Wodek all disembarked at the same stop, where the conversation continued. For his troubles, Wodek got punched several times in the face and fell to the ground: he sported two black eyes for the next few weeks. His attackers were in their twenties.
Happily, my attempt to get the boom-box-blasting young man to turn down the volume ended somewhat more peacefully. I politely tried to remind him that if everyone did what he was doing, we’d have a cacophony of chaotic sounds (at 7 a.m., no less), and no one would be able to hear anything. He turned the music down a bit, which I considered an acceptable compromise, and I thanked him.
Interestingly, Wodek’s takeaway from his experience might have been different from yours.
“The lesson I took from this is it would be good if more people expressed their disapproval of bad behaviour on public transportation,” he says. “Normally, people keep their heads down, and this has led to more of it happening.”
He well appreciates the understandable conclusion others may come to — that getting involved could get you assaulted.
“But the problem is,” he continues, “that people with proper civic standing are afraid to speak up for normal behaviour.”
I’ve found myself in other circumstances when I was nervous to say something but did anyway. One day, while I was going for a walk in my neighbourhood, I saw a young man who was engaged in an animated conversation with someone on his cellphone. He, too, was walking along the sidewalk, and he was screaming profanities at whoever was on the other end of the phone. There were kids playing on the street, and I suggested to the man that it wasn’t nice for him to share George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television with these kids. He ignored me and kept screaming. But it occurred to me he could just as easily have turned around and come at me, maybe with a weapon; the story could have had a very different outcome.
I hesitate to include this next point, but it’s hard for me to believe there’s no correlation between the kind of behaviour we see among some political leaders these days and what more of us are apparently seeing in the streets. When I was a kid, no one — and I mean no one — in politics ever called anyone else a liar. It just wasn’t done. There were agreed-upon guardrails that everyone understood were there and that everyone respected.
Those guardrails no longer exist. I don’t know whether it started with Donald Trump, but he surely is the master practitioner of disgraceful conduct in public life.
But it’s not just in America. We live in a country where the leader of the official Opposition seems to use increasingly vulgar language when talking to the prime minister. And I don’t love it when the PM tries to connect his opponent to extremist groups from which the Opposition leader has publicly disassociated himself.
Agenda segment, March 29, 2023: What role do anger and resentment play in politics?
At the risk of stating the obvious, isn’t it incumbent upon all of us to pick up our game here? Don’t parents need to teach their children that, in public places, you can’t be screaming profanities (even in fun) at your friends? Don’t politicians understand that, if they flood the zone with toxic negativity, the result isn’t victory for one party but a loss for everyone — because the public will simply give up on politics?
That fate certainly seems to have befallen Pam Damoff, the MP from Oakville North–Burlington who announced this week that she won’t seek re-election, in large part because public life has become too gross, threatening, and dangerous.
I suppose proponents of all this bad behaviour can simply tell me to toughen up, grow a pair, and get used to the new normal. But I’d rather not get accustomed to this. I remember a better time when this kind of crap didn’t happen. And I think I speak for many when I say I hope for a day when more Canadians can live up to the kinder, gentler reputation we think we have — but increasingly don’t demonstrate.