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News 2001

posted posted March 1, 2004, published July 20, 2001

Growing Vegetables and Shooting Hoops

How local youth relate - separate but together

"Facts and Arguments" as published in The Globe and Mail July 20 2001.

I spend a lot of time in my neighbourhood park in downtown Toronto, mostly working in the gardens or baking at the outdoor wood-fired oven there. Over the years I've met many young people who also spend a lot of time at the park, playing basketball or just 'chilling' with their friends. Sometimes those young folks have done odd jobs for the park, baking at the oven or cleaning up the park or helping out with community campfires.

People often ask me, has the behaviour of young people in the park altered in response to being involved in these activities? Has it “rehabilitated” young people who formerly made trouble? The short answer is, yes, I guess so. Certainly we now have very little damage (graffiti, vandalism) in the park, and there seems to be a code, more or less adhered to, of minimizing fights in the park. ("We don't fight here and we don't let other people come and fight here. We help keep this park safe." That's their theory, and while not strictly adhered to by everyone, it more or less carries the day.)

The longer answer is complicated. The young people who come and hang around, particularly in the proximity of the basketball court and the bread ovens and the fire circle, have a strong sense of themselves as a separate culture, insiders with everyone else on the outside. In that way their sense of themselves is parallel with many other people who use the park, e.g. the middle class older folks who have a strong sense that we are the insiders, the legitimate people who behave well.

The sharp separations mean that if the older folks in the park come and try to act friendly with the young guys, they are often rebuffed, sometimes very rudely. The young guys tell them to get lost, and the older folks are shocked and appalled at their manners. There continues to be a lot of pretty graphic swearing, and if we hadn't disconnected the electrical power outlet near the basketball courts, we would still be hearing a lot of uncensored music that blasts out rape-and-violence songs across the park. There is a fondness for the "ghetto" look -- lots of litter and periodic binges of breaking glass. This kind of stuff is cyclical, but not much under the control of parks staff or other park users.

The various social circles that form around the bake ovens or the campfire circle (this includes the outdoor music and theatre rehearsals that are often in our park, usually also near the ovens), are so near the basketball court that the different scenes can't help but overlap. The cooking fires/ ovens were added after the young guys had established themselves, and were located nearby. The overlap grates continually, because of the forced proximity of unmatching groups. Neither side chooses to be near the other, but the young guys very much want the basketball court and the older people (and their little kids) very much want the cooking fires. Or the older people very much want the fresh air of their evening walk through the park (some of the most beautiful flowerbeds are also near this part of the park) and the young guys very much want their evening campfire, to drink at and maybe roast hot dogs. So they are constantly forced into each other's grating presence.

This "grating" is actually rather productive, even if sometimes painfully so. I learned the usefulness of such proximity from a wonderful essay written by the Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie. The essay is called "Conflict as Property," and it treats conflict as a precious, practical resource to a community for summoning up the gifts of the people who live there. Christie wrote about the theft of this resource by lawyers, courts and so on, who take conflict out of a community and thereby preventordinary people from behaving with courage and generosity and ingenuity -- important practical forms of spiritual exercise.

So: a week ago I was working in the vegetable garden beside the ovens and some of the young people were having a loud, scary discussion relating to sex and prison life, and involving a lot of graphic cursing. Neither of us could move to a different location, so there we were: me with my spade and they with their stories, a very light rain falling on us both. I was forced to listen to things I would never have to listen to inside my house, inside my own social class, and they were forced to get intermittent glares from me. Eventually (after quite a while), the talk modified, toned down a bit, then stopped.

I saw some of them again the day after. I was revolted with them, and they were hostile to me, the middle-aged lady mixing into their business. But I had a pizza-making group to attend to at the outdoor oven, and they had to play basketball, so we were forced to stay near each other. Some of the older children in the pizza-making group went to watch the basketball, and then they got their turn at one of the hoops and began to play too. One of the basketball players came over and played with them, because, he told me, kids like to play with a bigger guy, it makes them feel big. The parents at the oven were all busy talking to each other, and there was nothing about the scene to worry them. The usual swearing almost stopped, because of the code of not swearing near young children, but the basketball went on and the drinking went on and the pizza-making went on. Everybody was having a good time.

At some point well into the evening one of the young guys walked by and said some friendly remark, and I noticed I wasn't angry anymore. There was such a pleasing, even joyful, normalcy about the scene that I couldn't feel anymore, as on the day before, that the end of civilized society had arrived.

So: who was rehabilitated? Are the shocked older people like me also in need of rehabilitation, or in need of forgiveness, for all the unfair advantages we routinely gain for ourselves and our group, and which we may try to explain away by pointing to the bad behaviour of others outside our group? Who knows? What I think I know is that there have to be standards, and that in cities like this one people have to learn to work out the standards across different groups, and that this work, ideally, is continually in progress and needs proximity. The campfires and bake oven in our park are an interesting, continuous prompt for such proximity. For me, sometimes, such proximity makes me delight in the lively, quirky existence of people quite unlike me. On good days, they do me the honour of delighting in me as well.

Jutta Mason

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