Sense of Community

Isn't it quite wonderful to live in a community where you feel accepted, feel an integral part of that community? We like to think, in Canada, that we represent a large community of immigrant populations, absorbed into the whole, welcoming the opportunity to be a part of the Canadian social experience. Canada has, after all, so much to offer, in its freedoms, its assurances of equality, its egalitarian social enterprise.

True, the two founding populations are often suspicious of one another, often on tenterhooks about perceived grudges which should have long ago been laid to rest. With one community grumbling over the entitlements of the other taking away from their own. In a sense it's like a family with two siblings in the stages of emerging adulthood, competing for their parents' attention, struggling to achieve parental approval for their singular ambitions.

That's on the macro level, where there is also a humanly-natural challenge between the provinces for attention and approval and larger slices of the national economic advantage. But at the micro level, where we live, in our cities with their own very particular and nuanced characteristics, we develop a deep sense of belonging and satisfaction. We develop a sense of allegiance to what is most familiar and dear to us.

This is our city, we belong here. This is the street we live on, the neighbourhood in which our street is located; it has a certain flair, a characteristic personality unique to it, comprised of a particular demographic, reflective of background, culture, ethnicity. And all those differences merge and converge and become a large accepting whole. Except, sometimes that isn't exactly what happens.

Sometimes something else emerges; social alienation between solitudes. Between ethnic, cultural, religious traditions and backgrounds, and then those who adhere to those particularities prefer to maintain an aloofness, an apartness, to preserve what they hold dear, eschewing contact with others whose backgrounds don't quite relate, and an uneasy truce results.

Imagine walking down the street you live on and not greeting with some degree of familiarity neighbours who have lived on that same street as long as you have, and whose faces have become as familiar to you as those of your friends and family. Cities develop certain traits reflective of their inhabitants. There are 'friendly' places and there are detached places, where indeed one passes others deliberately avoiding contact.

An amazing incident occurred in Toronto last week. A man, on a public transit conveyance, sat beside another, younger man. Making eye contact, the man seating himself thought it a civil act to greet the other. Which took the younger man aback, and causing him to feel insulted that a complete stranger, someone he had never seen before, had the unmitigated temerity to greet him as though he knew him.

Expressing his annoyance, his simmering anger to the stranger, an apology was elicited, and repeated. Imagine, apologizing for being friendly. What kind of social alienation could explain this? That it exists quite beggars belief in social civility. It staggers the civil imagination. Each and every day in encountering a stranger as I move about the place I live in, I offer a greeting to complete strangers. Most often, but not always, they reciprocate, and we move on.

In the incident in Toronto, when the offending stranger exited the bus at his stop, the offended stranger followed him. At some point he stood before the innocent stranger and demanded to know why he had greeted him, at which point the man apologized yet again. And to emphasize his point, his aggravation at the insult of familiarity, he pulled out a knife and stabbed the friendly stranger, thrice.

Then swiftly exited the scene. What kind of emotional monster is that?