Death by taser, asphyxtiation or . . .

A Polish man Robert Dziekanski, who was coming to Canada on a landed immigrant visa, died after being tasered at least twice and then manhandled by 4 RCMP officers at the Vancouver Airport (YVR). There has been and will continue to be much speculation about the cause of his death.

The way I see it this unfortunate man was killed by a process that we have let get into the hands of heartless bureaucrats, who have little imagination and most of all little sense of responsibility for their actions, or lack of action. There were several breakdowns in the processing of this non-English speaker in Vancouver Airport.

To begin with he must have shown signs of agitation on the plane and then going through Canada Immigration at YVR. Why was this simple fact not recognized by anybody responsible right away and within the first hour of his getting off the plane and onto YVR premises?

Yesterday we learned that he was referred for secondary processing since he was carrying documents related to becoming a landed immigrant to Canada. After his first encounter with Immigration Canada, he wandered away but within an hour or so he was brought back for secondary processing. And that process was successfully completed so to all intents and purposes he was accepted as a legal landed immigrant.

Then there is the case of how YVR officials dealt with inquiries by his stepfather during the six hours that he and the man’s mother were in YVR waiting and looking for her son! Once again the complete blackout that has been allowed to deliberately designed into the process between exiting the plane and getting to the arrivals area caused this man’s only contact in Canada to turn away from the airport while he experienced more and more isolation and disorientation with a process that completely failed him when he was most in need of simple human decency and understanding.

Is there no person in charge of what happens to an obviously vulnerable person in that process? Is it really necessary that people who have exited a plane at YVR and who are being processed by Immigration Canada and Customs Canada must be held in a virtual no-mans land with no possibility of responsible communications to the outside or communications into it?

Given the almost completely negative record, over the last few years, of handling people exhibiting extraordinary behaviours in Vancouver it seems that we all condone heartless and brutal handling by agents responsible to “serve and protect”.

We includes newspapers, TV, political leaders, and all of us apparently normal people who know how to navigate our way from the exit of a plane arriving at YVR to the arrivals area, without the threat of taser assault, forced asphixiation, or delirium

Mr. Dziekanski was killed by a process handled by unfeeling and robotic bureaucrats, no matter the direct or indirect causes of his final death struggle.

On this day in 1963, JFK’s body was laid to rest in Arlington Cemetery

I remember that day 44 years ago since it was a Sunday and I spent a lot of the day watching the black and white TV report of the public ceremony. The event lasted several hours and was the only thing being broadcast that somber day.

I was living with my family and first wife in Ste-Foy QC. My wife was pregnant with our third child. Daniel would be born on March 24, 1964 at the Jeffrey Hale Hospital in Quebec City.

Nov 23, 1963 and I was living in Quebec City

It was in 1963 (November 23rd) that assassination in Dallas Texas ended the promising (or so it seemed at the time) presidency of JF Kennedy.

Revelations since then about his voracious sexual appetite and seeming disregard for the eventual impact of possible scandal on his political future, have dimmed my image of him.

In retrospect it is evident that he was clearly a deeply conflicted man. The popular image of his public and healthy virility and apparent keen sense of what was right seems so wrong and foolish now. A facade of brilliance and attractiveness kept from us the real story of a private man who indulged in dangerous behaviour and had a visceral disregard for accepted morals.

It is especially ironic that another deeply flawed public figure, J. Edgar Hoover, used the investigative resources of the FBI to blackmail the Attorney General of that time, JFK’s mercurial brother Robert, to extend his tenure as Director of that agency.

All human beings carry within them flaws and contradictions that cause them to do things that lead eventually to the sad conclusion that holders of great public office are too often partly good and partly bad. Some are seen by historians as evil men, although their public careers were marked by “heroic periods”.

Of recent memory are Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Then there are other men like Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein. African political leaders from Liberia, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Angola and Zimbabwe also qualify in the historical record of men who caused brutal violence to their own peoples and neighbours.

No women leaders here though! In most cases where women figure in the historical record they are usually associated with the establishment of public order and peace.

More discussion about “The God Delusion”

More than a year after publication of Dawkins’ venturing into philosophy and criticism of theisms, the discussion continues, here!

Reading a series of blog/article links, I found this interesting review by Jim Holt, who writes about science and philosophy for NY Times. Any serious effort to challenge or support the notion of God’s existence or non-existence does get my attention via those bloggers that I have most respect for. That includes Sean Carroll, Jim Holt, Bob Wright, Theodore Dalrymple and such.