To the editor,
Passing Skeena Middle School the other day, I noticed the flags flying at half-mast and wondered, for a moment, who had died that would deserve such recognition. Then the horror of April 27 came back and I remembered that 11 people were now dead, many more injured, countless more in pain and confusion as we all struggled to make sense of the Lapu-Lapu Day tragedy.
My gaze turned to the school windows and I hoped that there was a conversation going on in each classroom, that teachers and students, perhaps with parents, were talking together to understand the madness that had just exploded amongst us. There is no easy answer here, no slogan serves, but the young need to understand the world they are inheriting. As do we. So the talk will be painful and awkward, the discussion complex, its outcome evolving throughout our lives, much like the Montreal Massacre of 1989.
But a way has been shown. Bringing the community together in social solidarity and support the day after the attack, Vancouver community organizer Sammie Jo Rumbaua used the Filipino phrase isang bagsak, which means, “When one falls we all fall, but when one rises, we all rise.”
A massacre is a tragedy of loss; of citizens, of lives not lived, potential and possibility extinguished, opportunities evaporated, gifts gone forever. For each of us is a unique gift; to our families, community, our country, each of us a contribution that has never been made before and will not be repeated. To lose that to mayhem brings both horror piercing pain.
But it also extinguishes the differences that we too often allow to divide us; race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual preference, political persuasion. Tragedy instantly brings us into shared community and renewed compassion as the differences of our births evaporate and we recognize the humanity we share.
Compassion holds us all up. As we rise from this loss, how do we continue to hold up one another? More mental health services surely but what else? How can we create a society that sees its goal as supporting every citizen to be the gift each at our best can be? When we recognize we are together in this shared enterprise called life, we all benefit.
That is the enlivening conversation that can be taking place not only in every classroom but every church, every coffee shop, every kitchen table. We cannot be well when the world is not.
Robert Hart,
Terrace, B.C.
