Last week, my 24-year-old stepdaughter was attacked on the subway. Hit in the face by a stranger. Gratuitous violence, sneaky violence, omnipresent violence.
It left him with a spectacular black eye.
More and more, I have the impression that society as a whole is suffering from a black eye. I feel like I’m living in the song by Montrealer Leonard Cohen: The Future. I feel like the world has lost its compass.
A world of zombies
Every day on my way to work at QUB, on Avenue du Parc, I pass groups of indigenous homeless people, their eyes glassy, intoxicated, who stagger around, reaching out to motorists, risking being hit at any moment.
In front of Émilie-Gamelin Park, I come across women in crisis, who prostitute themselves in the parking lot where I park my car, on the ground littered with syringes. Human feces adorn the wall.
In QUB, after stepping over a homeless man sleeping in front of the door, I interview a director who in her documentary relates the case of six-year-old children addicted to porn or adults so addicted to violent sexual images that They develop erectile dysfunction.
Or I speak with an endocrinologist about this Ontario man, with a penis, who wants to have a vagina “built”, paid for by the State, because he considers himself non-binary.
Or I speak with a columnist about this report from Newspaper about six-year-olds being bullied, called “fat pigs” by other six-year-olds.
Or I’m talking about this photo of Shani Louk, an Israeli hostage with a dislocated body, raped and then thrown into the back of a Hamas terrorist truck. A photo that has just won an award of excellence. A photo that could only have been taken if the photographer was with the terrorists during the massacre of October 7, 2023.
Or I’m talking about this photo of Yazan Kafarneh, 10 years old, who died of malnutrition in Rafah.
So all day long I think about The Futurethe title song from Leonard Cohen’s album…
“Things are going to slide in all directions
There will be nothing more
that you can measure.
There will be a break from the old Western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There will be ghosts, there will be fires on the road
And the white man dancing
You will see your wife hanging upside down
Her features covered by her overturned dress.
“Give me back the Berlin Wall
Give me Stalin and Saint Paul
Give me Christ
Or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don’t like children anyway.”
‘Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree left
And shove it in the hole
Of your culture.
Do you know what my daughter-in-law told me? Regularly, in the metro, she sees people taking crack.
Clockwork Orange
Leonard Cohen is not the happiest of singer-songwriters. But he had a premonitory gift. This song was written 32 years ago.
In The Futureits conclusion is trying: “I have seen the future, brother: it is murder”.
“I have seen the future, brother. It’s murder.”