I am a student at the Collège de Maisonneuve. I am a nationalist, imbued in my political vision with a realism that I try to keep as cold as possible. In short, the idea of defunding the police, for me, is a joke. A dangerous joke, but a joke nonetheless.
I have pretty good notions of history to say that no situation of anarchy, which would inevitably follow the abolition of the police, was able to last. Moreover, rare are the situations of anarchy that have been followed by a healthy democracy. Indeed, post-Soviet Russia was a jungle where a film director could easily buy a real tank for his film in exchange for a pittance. Consequence: Putin emerged from this chaos, and this anarchy created by the fall of the USSR led to the war in Ukraine that we know.
We can also speak of the double emergence of Bonapartist imperial regimes in France after poorly controlled revolutions. Even Minneapolis had to back down in the face of the same demands that are made today by the General Society of Students of the Collège de Maisonneuve (SOGEECOM) because they caused too much crime and chaos.
Our generation stands with the cops. We stand with the people who are terrified by the shootings in Montreal. That doesn’t mean we’re naive about certain problems that the police may have, but we trust society enough to believe that we can solve these problems with the police and not against them.
Often, we will present our generation as a woke generation. It is to be nuanced. The most “vocal” ones are. But the majority are not. During a sociology lesson given by a teacher openly on the left, this teacher has already complained about the lack of militant fervor displayed by the class, saying that this lack represented an insult to the various minorities. During the entire session, almost no one spoke during his class, in what appeared to be a boycott by silence.
On the contrary, a history lesson given by a more neutral teacher, Samuel Trudeau, generated enthusiasm in the class thanks to the professor’s good humor, with even the more leftist and more liberal students interacting a lot in the course. What I respectfully ask of commentators like Richard Martineau and Mathieu Bock-Côté is to stop spreading the idea that Generation Z is blindly, totally woke.
Our generation is also young people who will want something different as a way of seeing the world. Young people who reject extremist ideologies. Young people who want peace and not revolution. Young people who want to live in Quebec and do not recognize Montreal as unceded territory.
In short, we also exist. Thanks a lot.