Stolen Cars

Here's another article I wrote for submission to the Free Press. I don't know if they will publish it, there were already two good opinions on this topic in Sunday's paper, so maybe it will just be for the exclusive pleasure of the readers of The Disclaimer.

Two separate and spectacular incidents of “joyriding” last week have me thinking a lot about the nature of these crimes and wondering what it all means.

In the first incident, involving two Cadillac Escalades, I was tempted to see a twisted form of divine justice—poor kids getting even by smashing up two luxury vehicles. I hate big ostentatious automobiles with a passion, the motivation to own such wasteful spectacles, to me, is a clear indication of a society whose values are seriously wrong-headed, The very idea of celebrating and displaying one’s status by owning an SUV worth in excess of $75,000 is utterly abhorrent to me.

So though this spree caused a host of incidental damage I was captured by the idea that these were the actions of some hopeless bunch of kids who had no access to a strong role model at home, who didn’t see the point in playing by the rules of a society that seemed dead set against them, and who ended up taking their frustrations out on a pair of well-to-do Winnipegers with repulsive taste in transportation.

Of course I had no way of knowing who these kids were, or what their circumstances might be. My reflections on the injustice of life in a city where chronic poverty is routinely ignored by latte slurping, SUV driving yuppies are not based on hard facts, they are merely unfiltered judgments I am guilty of indulging in. For all I know these could have been bored sub-urban kids encouraged by too many violent video games.

Yet I clung to the idea, in spite of the nearly universal cry for stronger youth laws and harsher punishments, that somehow we were reaping what we had sown. As if fêting one’s wealth and advantage in the form of a modern day gilded chariot was a form of hubris the gods had finally decided to punish.

Then I read about an incident involving a stolen Sunbird trying to run down a group of early morning joggers. The perpetrators of this incident were not merely reckless, they were downright pathological. Again the facts in this case are few, but one must imagine these guys were high on something, how else to explain such irrational and inhuman actions?

I was forced to reconsider my natural “soft-on-crime” instincts. This act had finally angered me and let me see the red that most of Winnipeg was already seeing. What on earth would cause someone to steal a vehicle and attempt to play chicken with a group of innocent strangers? How could the moral fibre of any human person be so thinly weaved?

The compassionate instincts of the current justice system are well and good, but because they are not re-enforced by a caring and nurturing society they end up being completely misplaced and useless. Those who cry for vengeance in the face of crimes like these—and I admit that in the second case vengeance starts to seem like an appropriate response—are often unwilling or unable to recognize their own culpability; but it is equally true that those who commit these offences do so seemingly without fear of consequence, and must be held in check somehow, lest we all learn to live in fear.

Our laws seem to view our society as being more mature than it is, which is noble, but unfortunately not a remedy for the realities we live with. We are a highly individualistic and often indifferent people who quite naturally breed defiance among the mostly forgotten multitude of dispossessed youth who have no appropriate role models, and no way of understanding or expressing their circumstances.

The lawlessness that results from our ailing social order is not a product of soft sentences, but it is clearly not helped by them. So reluctantly, I am starting to realize that punishment and long term incarceration are the only possible options. After all, rehabilitation and redemption can only be accomplished in societies that believe that humanism and social justice are more worthwhile goals than glorifying the right to drive golden carriages.