This is not the blog I had intended for this week

This is not the blog I had intended for this week. It’s a world away from the tongue-in-cheek look at Tropical politics during the silly season. Instead recent events at home weigh on me.

Some parts of the media proclaim “Canada has lost its innocence”. Over a 33 year career in media I have heard that more than once. Usually it involved nutbars with guns. When it comes to the events of Monday and Wednesday all it did was result in the loss of a generation’s self delusion. That delusion being one built around pious righteousness that nobody would attack Canada, we’re too nice.

Canada is nice, and peaceful, and civilized. And guess what? People who are none of those things violently hate us for it. That’s right, violently hate. Ugly word isn’t it? It takes a lot of energy to hate one person, never mind an entire country who would rather sit down over a cup of tea and amiably chat about everything under the sun (especially a kids game played on ice), rather than plot how to destroy an entire race of people and their inclusive nature.

When it comes to assertions that Canada has lost its innocence I’m pretty sure they don’t know a great deal of our history. The murder of Louis Riel and the NorthWest Rebellion, the Vancouver Post Office riot of 1935, the country’s experience in the First and Second World Wars, or the invocation of the War Measures Act in 1970 after homegrown terrorist kidnappings and bombings. A search of Canadian history shows many instances of our having lost our “innocence” long before the events of the past few days.

That it was a huge wakeup for the country is without doubt. That it wiped the slightly smug arrogance of untouchability off our faces is a sure thing. So is the loss of a collective delusion that a generation of relative internal peace could last forever. And to me it’s not a bad thing because it opens up the discussion of what it’s going to mean to us in the coming months.

The people who hate us aren’t going to win our conversion. They aren’t going be able to frighten us. They might occasionally take a shot at us and some people will get hurt. But they can’t defeat who we are as a collective nation of people who spend a lot of time loving and caring for each other. It would never occur to us to spend our lives cowering in caves and desert tents using only ignorant hatred to sustain our reason to live. In Canada we use our lives to forward the purposes of civility, reason, and knowledge.

Let’s keep some published figures in mind. The authorities have revoked and cancelled the passports of 90 people. I suspect there will be more, but that’s an aside. Conservatively estimate that at least three times that number are high on the watch list, and round it off to around 400 people. In a nation of 33 million people the reality is that an overwhelmingly larger number of us love and respect each other than wish harm on strangers. It’s why I’ll not be frightened or cower indoors. If I was at home, I would be out at the pub around the corner, enjoying the company of my neighbours and friends over a burger and a beer.

However, we must also be aware that there are people out there who wish us harm, large scale and small. We must be vigilant to the quiet and withdrawn and we must learn to talk with them, and engage them in a conversation. The individuals who committed the soldier murders this past week were “radicalized”. Perhaps, but somewhere along the way they passed through many hands in officialdom that might have taken a moment to listen to the underlying issues, the real personal ones of alienation and isolation. It wasn’t until they started acting out that anyone paid attention with police visits and revocation of passports. They became tools of extremism because it was the only way they had a voice to be heard.

We must also be cautious of the loud and grandiose, whose particular firebrand rhetoric speaks of hate and exclusion. That one thing is better, and the other lesser. In Canada we’re pretty attuned to these folks, but rarely do we engage in shutting them up by declaring them offensive to our educated intelligence.

Personally I am against any form of extremism, be it practiced in the name of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, or any political stripe. The methods of extremism are familiar and somewhat frightening to anyone who has experienced them before, in childhood. By the common nature of the world they are just a common street corner bully! And for most of us, we outgrow our fear of them.

Canada didn’t lose its innocence this week. We are far too mature a country for that. We just awoke from a slumber to realize yet another barbarous bully needs to be stared down and educated, perhaps by force that we like to be left in peace.