Every day the memorial on Yonge Street grows larger it seems. It marks, for many Torontonians if media accounts can be believed, of a death of innocence.

It was there on Boxing Day when bullets flew striking down seven people whose faces we saw little of, but killing 15-year-old Jane Creba, whose face is indelibly seared into our memory.

And hands are wringing furiously all over the GTA as to what is to be done.

As an American, to whom such scenes in our cities are by no means novel, I am struck by both the big city American nature of this senseless act occurring in “Toronto the Good” and by the similarity of solutions being bandied about in Toronto to what has been tried in the U.S.

On New Year’s Eve, the Toronto Star‘s Linda Diebel published a overview of the aftermath of the Boxing Day shooting in which prominent community members called this a “watershed” moment for Toronto.

After 52 shooting deaths and 78 homicides in the city over 2005, Toronto reaches a “watershed” moment. Why?

In Diebel’s article the first thing that stood out was the reaction to this shooting.

Diebel wrote Creba’s slaying was different because “. . . at 15, she could have been anybody’s daughter, sister, friend. Partly, it’s because she was mortally shot on Yonge St., in the heart of the city, simply because she happened to go shopping on Boxing Day.”

Did that make her slaying that much different than the 78 others? Were they not someone’s child too? Did they not have lives as well?

Ontario Conservative Leader John Tory told Diebel that the Boxing Day shootings are particularly “disconcerting because they hit at one of the things that has, over a period of time, made Toronto special — our safe downtown. It is important as part of Toronto’s success.”

Interviewed with Tory was business consultant David Pecaut who gushed “This week was unbelievable. It has hit us all — my daughter was out shopping at the Eaton Centre just one hour before …”

And Tory said the time has come to “seriously harness the power of the business community.”

To do what?

Are they really trying to say that because an attractive white girl was killed where people spend a lot of money therefore official notice must now be paid to the gun violence in Toronto?

Does anyone else see this or is it just because some of us down here in the States are so adept at picking up racial code talk because we’ve been hearing it all our lives?

Take a look at this tableau and wonder why perhaps Ms. Creba’s face and reaction to her tragic, senseless death has garnered so much attention. Is this the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about?

How about victim number 54 (since the Star likes assigning numbers to gun deaths)? His name was Andre Burnett and his life and death were properly chronicled in the Star although no one made grand pronouncements of “watershed moments” when he was killed.

But if you read Jim Rankin’s article from New Year’s Eve in the Star there are clues to what this is all about, if anyone cares to face them.

Why am I writing about this? The ghost of America hovers over this death scene in more ways than one. Where does all of Toronto’s suddenly lucrative gun trade come from? Where did the soundtrack and script for these deadly scenes originate if not on the streets of LA and New York (and Hollywood)? And where do some of the solutions seem to be coming from as well?

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair is putting 300 more cops on the street in the New Year. The infatuation with throwing round numbers at problems seems to be a hit in Toronto as well as New York where former Mayor Rudi Giuliani also swarmed the business and entertainment districts with police.

Giuliani was ultimately successful at making New York safe for tourists and upscale shopping. There was a small price to be paid, though. Ask Abner Louima or the family of Amadou Diallo.

Does Toronto really want a Giuliani solution? Julian Fantino may be waiting in the wings to try, according to Councillor Rob Ford (Ward 2, Etobicoke North), also a possible candidate for mayor.

Ford, for his part, advocates America’s favourite Final Solution.

“I’m disappointed in all of the three leaders,” Ford told the Star. “Everyone knows I’m a Conservative and a big Stephen Harper fan but I’m disappointed in him for ignoring the subject of capital punishment. Nobody is touching it with a 10-foot-pole and it’s ridiculous because there has to be a message to all these gang-bangers that if you kill somebody, you are going to die too.”

Oh. . . dear. . . me. Do they ever learn? Come to the U.S. Mr. Ford and see how well the “deterrent” effect of capital punishment has worked on gang violence down here.

Do you not think for a second Mr. Ford, that as the bullets were flying on Yonge Street on Boxing Day afternoon that the people who pulled the guns and started firing didn’t pause to think for at least a second about their own mortality?

Well-meaning people want to do something about gun crime. NDP candidate Olivia Chow expressed her exasperation to the Star.

“How many more innocents will it take?” she asks. “We all have to face this. It is our collective responsibility. If we have kids being killed in the streets by other kids, we have to realize that something is very wrong. They grew up in here in Toronto. How did they turn into hardened, heartless and brutal killers? ”

For what it’s worth, I have an observation. In the U.S., for decades, people of colour were inside of the United States but not a part of it and in many respects, still aren’t. Typecast as entertainment, relegated to menial labour and shunted about in ghettos, they were allowed to breathe American air without ever being considered a part of the American family.

So many of our youth live inside the United States and the only future they see is encapsulated in the title of 50 Cent’s movie: Get Rich or Die Trying.

Do you see that Mr. Ford?

I grew up in the 70s and 80s watching a lot of CBC television beamed across Lake Erie from London. One thing that stuck out in my mind then as it does now was the stunning lack of faces of people of colour on Canadian TV.

With the exception of a single character on King of Kensington, my initial impression was that Canada had no people of colour whatsoever. As I got older, I realized this was not true, but you’d never know it watching the CBC back then, as you never really saw people of colour on U.S. TV until the 1960s.

When you do not see yourself represented in the mainstream, whether it be on television, in the classroom or the boardroom, one can assume you’re not fully thought of a member of the broader community, whether it’s Los Angeles or Toronto, the United States or Canada.

We spin our wheels with blue ribbon committees trying to answer Ms. Chow’s salient question when, at least for me, the answer is simple, although the solutions are costly and painful for the majority population.

Maybe that’s why nothing else has worked — not more cops, more prisons or more money throwing.

What has to be understood is that each young person, regardless of race, gender and economic status, looks ahead in life and asks the exact same question: “What does my future look like?”

The answer is greatly influenced by many factors, including the present situation that the young people find themselves in. If they see that their situation holds little chance of improving in the near future, they draw the necessary conclusions about how to live in their present.

When the disaffected youth in Toronto or any city in North America ask the central question “what does my future look like?” what will any of the leaders now grappling with this issue say in return?

For if you cannot tell that person that their future holds for them equality, opportunity, community and a chance to be whatever they want to be, then all the king’s horses and all the king’s men aren’t going to amount to a hill of beans.

If you had asked Jane Creba on the morning of her death what the future held for her, what do you think she would have said? Similarly, on the same morning, if you asked the young men who would be firing guns on Yonge Street what they thought the future held for them, what do you think they would have said?

In our hearts on both sides of the border, we know what the solutions are. The real question is do we have the guts to address the issue of racism and make the necessary changes not just in our policy, but in ourselves?

Keith Gottschalk

Keith Gottschalk

U.S. Keith Gottschalk has written for daily newspapers in Iowa, Illinois and Ohio. He also had a recent stint as a radio talk show host in Illinois. As a result of living in the high ground...