Shelters under attack
While violence continues unabated in other parts of the world, here in Canada we stand in witness to attacks on the helpless (fill in the blank). Let’s see: in Halifax, a bus driver attacked a helpless toy seal. Here in my neighbourhood, police are on alert, because someone has been shooting helpless bus shelters.
Not this one, yet. It could be next. Over the last couple of weeks, no less than 125 separate assaults on bus shelters have taken place, for a damage bill running at $85,000, so far. There’s something wrong in a world where crime scene tapes are in place at one frame after another through neighbourhoods. Senseless violence.
I’ve also been frustrated when the bus doesn’t arrive, but I’ve never drawn an airpowered weapon and fired a steel ball in revenge. Glass shatters and falls like hail. A noise in the night. And then, the victims. People forced to stand without anything between their backs and the icy winds of a nordic winter. The police have determined the modus operandi, and the investigators have been in situ, but the persona non grata still runs (rides) free. Not on the bus, obviously.
What next? Assaults on traffic lights that turn red before going green? Revenge on the sounds of wind in the wires? Will the breakthrough that solves this series of crimes come only after we (the bus riders) have no place to hide, when the last abribus has fallen in a one-sided battle? Graffiti doesn’t destroy (other than artistically). A paint bomb or two just assails the senses, without affliction of wind driven rain and snow. Please, let the violence end!
