Apathy, indifference - enemies of rights and liberties

Increasingly, I fear that I am becoming more and more dull witted, sedentary and workaday: passing my time trying my best to succeed at my job and striving, as the sellers of self help slogans would say, to balance my life. All too often, I fail to make time to keep up with the ideas, the news stories and even the court decisions that are informing and shaping civil rights and liberties issues in Canada and the world. Proof of the need for me to be more diligent is a rather embarrassing memory that I have of changing television channels, switching past the story, when news of the APEC pepper spraying incident was breaking in 1997. I came to my senses quickly, but my initial indifference has bothered me for years. Notwithstanding my initial and short lapse of sense, the memory of my first reaction and the pepper spraying event itself have become lodestars for me—guiding points that help me to find my way to being aware and indignant about threats to civil liberties and to being thankful that organizations like MARL exist.

Even though I try to be vigilant, not every news story gets my full attention or stays with me like it should. Now and again, though, something gets past all of the work related issues that occupy much of my time, the excitement and adventures that I have with my partner, and all of the small calamities that seem very big when they happen inside the little universe that stretches from the pit of my stomach to the outside edges of my skin. Over the past few months, two news stories have been trapped in my mind and have been agitating for attention like plaintive ghosts or prisoners rattling their chains not far from the front of my consciousness. The stories surfaced at about the same time this past March. One was covered by the local media and the other presented itself to me one day when I was looking at internet news headlines.

posting that showed a man in Winnipeg Square dropping his pants and squatting over a potted tree. Security footage of the incident found its way from security offices in Winnipeg Square to the renowned and world serving web site. Initially, it was this incident that was to be the subject of this piece—a starting point for some observations about expectations of privacy in public places, the duties that are, or ought to be, owed by private parties and their security forces to members of the public, and a call for some kind of application of current law or innovation in common law that would make private bodies liable for such abuses of authority. The subject of policing and security by private actors on private property (in spaces that some social scientists call “mass private property”) ought to attract a great deal of attention and concern from people who care about rights and liberties; it is an issue that I hope MARL will address again.

My plan for this to be a short piece with a legal and intellectual complexion did not pan out (this, it is not lost on me, might be an example of stating something that is abundantly obvious). I harbour the notion that it could have been such a piece and that something lucid and even compelling could have been crafted. But that article will have to wait for another time—if another time there be. I chose against the more objective and academic option because something quite unacademic and perhaps even anti-intellectual got in the way.

This brings me to the second news item. It was an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times and it was written by Larry Kramer. I hadn’t heard of Larry Kramer before March but the Los Angeles Times says that he is a 72 year old gay activist. The article has the kind of title that attracts an eye: Why do straights hate gays? From its beginning, the article is provocative. The inspiration for the article was U.S Marine General Peter Pace having declared that gay and lesbian troops are immoral. The fact that the statement was made, that it was not decried by politicians, commentators and the (predominantly heterosexual) community at large is the starting point for Kramer’s remarks. Partly, the article had an impact on me because it was addressed to me; mostly it made an impression because it was raw, angry and indignant. The piece identifies a variety of instances of apathy, discrimination, and brutality directed against gay citizens and stacks them up as examples that show hatefulness. It suggests that the affronts should not be conceptualized as fitting on a scale ranging from innocuous to malignant but on one that only marks degrees of evil. At one point Kramer asks his audience “Don’t those of you straights who claim not to hate us have a responsibility to denounce hate?”

I imagine that people come to care about civil rights and liberties for a variety of reasons. Most of us have an emotional investment and we all strive to be intelligent and persuasive when we communicate. It is a good thing, a necessary thing, for us to be intellectual and academic when we present our cases. In suggesting policy and legal solutions, we need to colour inside the lines, to use the right legal and parliamentary language. This is true whether we are explaining why people whose images are circulated in mean spirited, dignity depriving ways should have a legal remedy or if we are challenging legislation that threatens rights and liberties. What the news stories reminded me, however, and what I forgot for a moment in 1997 when the APEC pepper spray story was breaking, is that we should never loose touch with feeling indignant, angry and injured by actions that hurt, denigrate and demean other citizens—other humans.

I am not sure if Larry Kramer is right when he suggests that the heterosexual community is overwhelmingly hateful of gays and lesbians. Since I first read the piece there have been days when I have been more convinced and days when I have been less convinced. For me, though, it is never a question of whether Kramer is right but of how right he is. At the same time that I was thinking about Kramer’s article, I was following the local coverage of the Winnipeg Square incident. I also looked at the internet clip and I saw the comments of viewers and bloggers. I found smug and intellectually unsatisfying defences based on the view that the film’s subject brought disgrace on himself and assertions that because the incident happened on private property the security footage of it was fair game for exploitation. There was no shortage of explicit and implicit hatefulness. There was a sad shortage of outrage that private security personnel are not being held to the same standards of responsibility and answerability as their public counterparts.

The more that I thought about the Winnipeg Square incident, the more that I tried to shape my notions into clear, intelligent and compelling theses about private and public interests and laws that are or ought to be, the more I lost interest in being clever and intellectual. Since my little slip in 1997, I’ve tried to be good about reading and thinking about rights and liberties issues but as I’ve aged, become more comfortable and more settled, I’ve let the emotional dimension recede. Larry Kramer reminded me that being indignant and talking about indignities aren’t the same things. The lack of compassion, the degree of indifference and the obvious presence of hatefulness surrounding the Winnipeg Square incident should have turned the stomachs of Winnipeggers, the fact that it didn’t goes a long way to convincing me not only that Larry Kramer is much more right than wrong but that he was only mapping one little piece of a much bigger mass.