These are letters published in today's Free Press refuting the commentary I had in Sunday's paper. This is the first time the paper has published letters based on an article I've written. Frankly, I'm a bit tickled. Here they are:
Letter of the day
Wed Aug 22 2007
Car thieves aren't victims
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Re: Persecuting and Prosecuting Children, Aug. 19.
Ryan Kinrade equates children as equal victims in instances where they are objects of sexual attack and also as youthful car thieves causing willful damage and even death to others. I respectfully beg to differ.
A child who is the victim of a sexual attack is the target of a predator who is searching for someone who is less powerful than he to exercise power over. The perpetrator may have been the victim of some past injustice himself. In our society this does not entitle him to act out his resentment and frustration on an innocent human being.
In the same way the youthful car thief aligns himself with the sexual predator. The car thief may have been the victim of some sort of crime, but he is not entitled to steal and damage the property of others, or to maim and kill innocent third parties to empower himself or relieve his frustrations. The unfortunate victim of the car thief stands in the place of the child sexual assault victim in Kinrade's parable.
I do agree that child car thieves need to be treated differently than sexual predators, but when murder by motor vehicle results from car theft, the punishment needs to reflect the seriousness of the crime. Every perpetrator of every crime suffers from lost innocence. That does not excuse them for their willful and destructive behaviour.
I am extremely tired of the "everybody is a victim" culture, which I feel may be encouraged by Kinrade's musings. In some ways we are all victims of something in our pasts, but we can never use that as an excuse to victimize someone else with our own destructive behaviour.
WILLIAM D. WATSON
Winnipeg
Excuses, excuses Re: Persecuting and prosecuting children, Free Press (Aug. 18). Ryan Kinrade's article says the reason so many of these kids steal cars is because they are in impoverished environments. I beg to differ. As long as people make excuses for these kids they will keep doing it. I grew up with two verbally and physically abusive alcoholic parents. I grew up in the north end in the 1960s. I used to roam the streets sometimes until 2 a.m. but not to vandalize or steal. I was on a mission. That mission was to find enough pop and beer bottles to cash in so I could buy milk for my baby brother. I also went to bed many nights where my supper was a bowl of milk and a slice of bread broken up into the milk. I never used my childhood problems to steal anything, including food. I weighed 69 pounds when I graduated from high school. Please quit giving the kids of today a cop out. It won't help them in the end. The poor-me attitude will only get them so far and it probably shouldn't get them anywhere if they want to grow up to be productive members of society. One last thing, I am a proud Metis so don't think I'm being prejudicial. Sandi Miller Winnipeg
1 comment:
My Rebuttal of the Letters:
The main problem with William Watson's letter comes when he mistakenly assumes that I have given license to the car thief by virtue of his victimhood. He comments that the sexual predator may himself be a victim, but that doesn't entitle him to act on his urges. Nowhere do I say that a sexual predator is entitled to a diddle because he himself was diddled, and yet he accuses me of such a sentiment.
My point was not simply to excuse behavior because of circumstance or promote an "everybody is victim culture" but to point out our own culpability in the crime that leads the the young to become dispossessed. The crime is indifference. The crime is building monuments to celebrate wealth and liberty when poverty and slavery live at our feet.
Ms Miller's comments are full of bitterness and have almost no relevance to what I was talking about. First of all why do people who have had it bad and made good always assume that everyone who has had it bad should be the kind of person they are and be capable of the same things they've accomplished? I am not just like the kids I grew up with in my middle to upper middle-class neighborhood. We all have very different personalities and experiences. Furthermore, I'm sure the kids growing up there today see things in a far different way than we did as kids growing up on those same streets with the same relative incomes. I'm not sure why Ms Miller feels qualified to judge the youth who steal cars today. Her survival of poverty and alcoholism, noble as they may be, do not make her any sort of qualified expert on the lives of others who suffer such circumstances.
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