Thursday evening, the whole community of our school was horrified to learn what had happened near Boulevard des Roseraies and Place Cointerel. A shooting, when some parents and teachers came out smiling at their meetings, when others came home after a day of work, where some were having supper, discussing their day, watching TV or even reviewing their homework. You know the famous feeling of “It happened near you?” Well, many of us are sharing it this fall, many seeing the face of violence and being able to name it. Many of them can give us a real mental image, a scary photo set in the convenience store where our children go to get candy, the park where they play, the sign or the fence in front of which we pass each evening when returning from work.
From this milestone event and the ensuing discussions in our community, many questions arise and persist. What could have happened in the head of a child who spends his days in his neighborhood, at his elementary school, with his family so that he grows up and decides one day to buy or to accept? a weapon in order to use it? What is the series of microevents, encounters or decisions that led this grown-up child to threaten or take the life of another, to endanger his own life and that of the inhabitants of his neighborhood? What is our collective responsibility as citizens, as humans when we look at what is unfolding before our eyes this year? Some obvious answers are presented to us: accessibility of weapons, violence, poverty, social networks, the attraction of easy money, the need for a sense of belonging, interest in a parallel system that enhances us, even if this one is called street gang.
Now, let’s put those answers aside for a moment and dig a little deeper. Let’s ask ourselves these questions: are we open-minded? Are we ready to understand the reality of others? To accept the faults, the difficulties and the different ways of seeing the life of our peers? Do we take the time, do we make the effort, to maintain healthy human relationships? Are we showing real inclusion? Is there a way to create places where the debates of ideas, reflections on different lifestyles and cultures can take place from childhood and especially in adolescence, a period that we have all gone through? trying to get out of it as best we could? So much for individual responsibility. But what about the responsibility of a city, of a district in the face of these challenges? Yes, we have to talk about gun control and give the police the means to do their job, that’s for today.
But in ten years? What will prevent a child we know, in need of hope or in the grip of an unhealthy irony about his future, from being seduced quietly by criminal organizations? Any former child who has lived a life marked by little or big violence and who has somehow managed to become happy will tell you his story. It will be dotted with people who gave it time and love, but also adults who knew magically and without having planned to be there at the right time with their listening and their consideration. Parents of course, but also a teacher, coach, neighbor, worker, animator, daycare educator, grandparents; the variety of statuses of these determining people can be endless.
In a society, how do we organize the meeting of these children with these people who will give them the desire to have confidence in themselves, in their abilities, in their future? By setting up youth centers, by hiring interveners who act directly in their community, by creating events that bring the community together, by funding all these community organizations which today are struggling to get hold of. all the resources necessary to accomplish their work, their mission. In short, by creating places where a child can meet the other, where his family will meet other families and will be able to feel supported while forging links.
We believe that this is a solution within the reach of the budget of the Anjou borough, even of all the boroughs of Montreal, and that it is possible to give us the chance that, in ten years, these sums invested will make shine our neighborhood and contribute to a real reduction in violence in Montreal.
We have a privileged contact with the children who will be the teens of tomorrow in our community, and this contact is possible above all by the place that we share with them. Our request is that the borough commit to ensuring that other unifying places accessible to families and their children be funded annually, that a fixed and stable budget be allocated in the neighborhood to share this collective responsibility that we have in order to to contribute to the happiness and future hope of children who return to school each year.
* This letter is signed by:
Jean-François Charron, teacher
Isabelle Couët, mother and resident of Anjou
Chantal Poulin, teacher
Ginger Castura, citizen
Daisy Romero-Heredia, teacher
Thierry Lesage, teacher
Mélanie Colette, parent
Risse Rosalie Kenababu Ndala, teacher, mother and resident of Anjou
Lucie Castanha, citizen
Aouatef Masrouhi, citizen
Salima Hammouche, citizen
Zoubida Moukhtari, citizen
Lina Alnasrallah, citizen
Souhila Tallache, citizen
Souad Touil, citizen
Hind El Kadhari, citizen
Marie-Christine Dubé, teacher
Étienne Chrétien-Duguay, orthopedagogue
Catherine Arcand, teacher
Genny Ouellet, teacher
Andrée-Anne Tourigny Lachance, citizen