Five days from now, he and a lot of young people in Canada will wrap up their summer holidays. They’ll all be putting away their T-shirts, cut-offs and flip-flops and starting to wear school shirts and pants again. Instead of baseball gloves or tennis rackets, they’ll all be carrying their smart phones and backpacks full of textbooks again. Only this teenager I met from Toronto’s inner city, last week, has something in addition to school on his mind.
“There are friends out there who bring real benefit to your life,” he said this week, “and there are friends who don’t. It’s important to know who your real friends are.”