Of wrongdoing and atonement
Every day brings a new reminder that we live in the age of atonement, that William Faulkner was right when he said “the past isn’t over. It isn’t even past”.
Friday it was Peter Stoffer standing outside Pier 21, denying allegations that while defending veterans rights up in Ottawa, he was also guilty of inappropriate behaviour toward female NDP staffers.
The taint from the allegations also threated the reputation of sainted federal NDP leader Jack Layton, whom, according to a story in the National Post, failed to do anything formal about long-ago complaints against Stoffer. The ensuing furor had a now-familiar rhythm: Stoffer, who called himself a “hugger and touchy person” apologized to anyone who felt his actions “untoward” but denied ever “sexually assaulting or physically abusing anyone.”
Some defenders rallied around him on social media, talking “witch hunt” and political correctness, and, in the case of Henry Makow, whose purpose, he says on Twitter, is exposing feminism and the New World Order, tweeting, “Unwanted kisses nine years ago are front page news? Ridiculous.”
But NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, said he believed the women who had come forward and that he is “deeply disturbed” by the allegations.
On social media some who know Stoffer were shocked and depressed by the allegations, which, it is important to remembers, are just that.
Some, it seemed to me, began to distance themselves from the former-MP, including the exeditor of Maclean’s magazine who tweeted, “Just to be clear, it was MPs of all parties who consistently voted Stoffer most collegial – Maclean’s just counted the votes.”
I’ve interviewed Stoffer a few times and found him, as many people have, an unfailingly nice guy. That, of course, is not the point. The point, if the allegations are true, is that even the “nice guys” are part of a culture of sexual harassment on the Hill.
The point is also that it is senseless to argue, as some do, that, since the standards for humankind’s behaviour have evolved, you cannot measure the actions of yesterday by the standards of today.
The paradigm is different. We all know that, even the folks, who insist that “the pendulum has swung too far the other way”, when it comes to the outpouring of allegations of abuse of women and the historic mistreatment of broad swaths of the population. This makes the time in which we live very confusing for some.
The other day, after writing something about Africville, and a recent column about the Cornwallis statue controversy, I received an email from someone I’ve known for a long-time. Like me he is a white, male and getting up there in years. “My idea, well a question really, is, exactly when has atonement been reached (say for the wrongs the Blacks suffered) and when, exactly, is reconciliation (for the indigenous peoples) been achieved.”
“When will the rest of us know and be able to exhale.”
My view – after thinking about it for a bit and talking to a few people – is that, if you’ve wronged someone in some terrible way, it isn’t enough to just say that you’re sorry.
You need to prove it with your actions, then turn the page by somehow earning respect and trust. You need to demonstrate, moving forward, that your thinking is forever informed by this altered world-view.
Since this didn’t really answer the atonement question, I decided to go and see someone who deserved to have an opinion on the subject.
“You are so lucky,” Philip Riteman told me when I met him at his home out in Bedford. “Living in Canada you don’t know how lucky you are.”
At 95 he is no longer the man who once stood before auditoriums filled with school children, seen-it-all RCMP and others, speaking for “millions and millions who cannot speak,” as the back cover of his autobiography says. Those millions include five of his brothers and two of his sisters, his parents, nine uncles and nine aunts and “tons of cousins” – all from the same town on the Russian-Polish border, all victims of the Nazi death camps in World War Two. Riteman survived Auschwitz, he lived through Dachau, he somehow persevered through the death march in the Tyrolean mountains. He went on to move to Newfoundland, where he worked as a peddler through the out-ports and then expanded his sales territory to include all of Atlantic Canada, eventually owning and operating Riteman’s International. Eventually he and his wife and son moved to Halifax and began their lives here. But what he and his family suffered during the holocaust has never faded, like the tattoo on his left forearm—the number 98706, with a triangle denoting his Jewish faith, beneath it.
“I think of them every day,” he says of his dead family members. “I think of how they killed my little brothers and little sisters. I wonder, ‘how can anybody do this’... I will never in my life forgive them.”
I’m not in any way trying to put human suffering on some sort of scale, or to ludicrously compare the hardships of being a staffer on Parliament Hill to the horrors of the Nazi gas chambers.
My point, instead, is that maybe atonement ends, if it does at all, only when those who have been sinned against say that it can finally end.