Relax Toronto - you're not in the grip of a great Nazi resurgence

Racism is vile, wrong and offensive.

But there is one good aspect to hearing people express sincere racism aloud. It reveals the person as an idiot. Because racism is a form of extreme stupidity, or at the least, mental illness. I say the latter as someone who worked in a psychiatric hospital for a number of years. One of the striking things about some people with mental illnesses like schizophrenia is that a disproportionately high number of them are prone to racist and anti-Semitic outbursts.

In Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario three or four prominent public incidents of racism made the news. Those incidents took the form of graffiti and name-calling. One of them, which happened on a Toronto streetcar, was more of what could be described as "racially-charged," and was a reaction to to an alleged physical assault by the object of the racism.

This is hardly a tsunami of the post-election, Trump-inspired, global resurgence of "white nationalism" the mainstream media and some exploitative activists and politicians are making it out to be. To appreciate it in relative scale, in 2015, there were 64 traffic fatalities in Toronto, and the city on on track to surpass that in 2016. None of which were attributed to racism. So far this year in Toronto, there have been 363 incidences of shootings, in which there have been 518 victims.

Those are serious problems with unacceptably high numbers.

Yet instead of trying to calm the situation and put it in perspective, Toronto's pathetic virtue-signalling, attention-seeking "social justice" activists are fear-mongering and becoming apoplectic about a small handful of minor events. Events which could more easily be explained by the lack of mental health resources in Toronto than the outbreak of a post-election race war.

Racism is deplorable and should be condemned. There was a time when it was far too prevalent in Toronto. More can and should be done to eradicate it as much as possible. But much has changed in the last few decades. For those in a panic, stop being consumed by outrage and fear and get a grip. You can take great comfort in knowing that you're far more likely to be killed by a car or shot in the street than you are to be the victim of a racist insult by a stranger in public.

UPDATE: Nov 20/16: To the point of the above, it turns out one disturbed teenager was responsible for the allegedly "Trump-inspired" hate crime-wave.