Drivel

Here's a staggering bit of equivocation from the National Post's Peter Kuitenbrouwer:

Watching the throngs of students firing up butts as they emerged yesterday from [Bendale Tech], near Lawrence Avenue East, was a bracing experience. It may be that lung cancer will claim a lot more student lives around here than stray (or aimed) bullets.

What a masterpiece of obtuse treacle this article is! Subheaded "Despite incident, Bendale's kids are all right" Mr. Cutesybrouwer seems somehow--inexplicably--to have lost sight of the fact that while the majority of the school's students are indeed "all right," that doesn't in any way mitigate the fact that one of them is presently in hospital with a flipping bullet wound in his chest.

He concludes, mind-bogglingly, thus:

What strikes me is not that sometimes violence mars such schools, but that Bendale offers living proof of the great Toronto experiment: Kids of every race mix together and learn together. Some are learning here to be plumbers, carpenters and auto mechanics.

Please, please, PLEASE tell me that this was Cutesybrouwer's attempt at irony! I mean, never mind the fact that he's just described one of the miraculous products of this multiethnic "experiment" as "wearing a Playboy bunny necklace and a Playboy bunny sequined on her backpack" (and with a mouth foul enough, apparently, to make a real hooker blush), if this isn't irony then the man has just made it his position that the odd murder attempt by one teenager against another is a small price to pay for multiculturalism.

Oh, but! I see that he thinks the students of Bendale deserve "our protection--and our respect." Well, OK then. That makes everything better.