Fortunately, ridicule does not kill. But apparently, intolerance stupefies minds. Judge for yourself: in Outremont, neighbors disturbed by the noise made by children playing in the courtyard of their early childhood center (CPE) are preparing to attract the attention of a judge. A small group of neighbors storms: no noise in my yard!
It’s an unusual quarrel between neighbors, which shows to what incredible lengths intransigence can lead. Media reported this week that the CPE Le pitchounet, located in Outremont, on Bloomfield Avenue, in a peaceful residential area, finds itself stuck in litigation. Since the daycare’s little clients, aged 18 months to 5 years, have the right to play in their backyard, they have suffered the wrath of a handful of neighbors demanding a return to a certain peace of mind. No children in my environment!
A change in municipal regulations made last August freed the CPE and the educators from the obligation to travel with their horde of children the road separating them from the surrounding parks, because they could not have access to their backyard, associated by regulation of the city has a place of worship. Since this summer, it’s okay to go laughing, running, jumping, screaming and maybe even crying in the backyard instead of at the park. For the daycare, it’s a liberation. For some neighbors — not all, fortunately — it is an abomination.
Outremont has not recently given the best examples of tolerance to children. At the end of the last school year, Guy-Drummond elementary school received a ticket for excessive noise after outraged neighbors complained about a special activity with music and joy held — in broad daylight — by the ‘school. The school administration still has to pinch itself to believe it. The goal was to get the children moving at a frenzied pace in the middle of dinner time. For the neighbors, it was apparently a way of breaking up nap time.
Where are we as a society when the most natural and joyful of noises, that which comes from the little ones, that which embodies life, earns us a lawsuit? What a sad turn, pitting blind individualism against what community life should imply in terms of respect for living together.