A Creature Called Anger.

The anger, an undercurrent of electric energy coursing through the veins of downtown, it’s everywhere.

On Tuesday, a woman boarding the bus yells at a passerby; she hurls unintelligible racial slurs at a man who is none of those things she accuses him of. Her words, they hang heavy in the air, a marker of a heritage he had no choice but to accept by birth. This man and that woman, they are not enemies, not even acquaintances; they’d never met before he accidentally bumped the woman’s shoulder as she tried to board the bus. The man throws up his hands to clear the air of her words, pushing angry letters aside as he shrugs and keeps walking. Her words become a part of the constant urban soundtrack playing in the background on his walk home. The woman steps onto the bus. No one, not the driver, not the passengers, say a thing. It’s tolerated because it is what it is: an anger infecting the streets of a city rich with cultural diversity, a tapestry of colour and difference.

She’s white bread, boring and common, everything about her washes into the scenery of a tired city. Her angry words do nothing but push her further into the template of a city irritated with its own people. This anger, it’s a parasitic intolerance breeding a hostile symbiotic relationship not negotiated by the host, a city choking on eurokaryotic antagonism. Eurokaryotic, a word which once meant “good and true.”

On Wednesday, I am trapped in a net of police tape outside my apartment. Yellow and black webbing crisscrossing the whole length of the street. A forensics unit, an abandoned car, serious looking police men and women shaking their heads as they stare, hands on hips, wondering what to clean up first.

There’s a bullet hole in the window of my favourite coffee shop. A gaping wound surrounded by spidered glass, bleeding the smell of fresh ground coffee onto an emptier than usual street.

Instead of walking the direct half block to my bus stop like I do every morning, I am forced to walk the long way around. I stare intently at the faces of the business folk making their way to work, looking for reaction, looking for shock, dismay, looking for any emotion other than complacency. None of them seems fazed – they are, as with every day, preoccupied with their own lives, pouring full attention into iPods and Blackberries instead of studying the faces of their community, instead of acknowledging the fact today is not like every other day, that today there is blood staining their streets, that today there is anger lurking in their streets.

On Thursday, anger wounds another city patron in a knife fight. And another the next day. On Saturday, two more. Anger’s spindly fingers are slowly choking our city, holding tightly to the neighbourly benevolence and honest smiles people used to share freely without expectation of negative reaction, shaking the Canadian kindness out of the city’s pores.

Nearly a week of violence and no one is concerned but me. I am worried no one else seems to be worried. Our supportive and creative and safe downtown community is becoming a reason to stay indoors, ignore neighbours, turn inward and breed isolation: a stealthy cocktail of urban neglect feeding anger, helping this creature grow stronger, larger every day.

xoxo

M.L. H’art