Hope won’t keep us safe from terrorism
It was as if two bookends of love enveloped an encyclopedia of hatred.
Arriving in London two weeks ago, I found the front-page image was two youngsters from the town of my birth, Calgary. They’d been among the 22 victims of the bombing in Manchester.
Fast forward 10 days and, returning to Canadian shores, another newspaper front page portrayed another victim of another outburst of savagery, a young woman who’d studied in my city and then worked with the downtrodden. She was among eight killed in the English capital I’d just left.
Hatred shouldn’t be the link between Chloe Rutherford,Liam Curry and Christine Archibald. Far better such convergence arose from reactions of parents separated by distance but unknowingly bound together with love.
“They lived to go to new places together and explore different cities. They wanted to be together forever and now they are,” is how the parents of Rutherford, 17, and Curry, 19, described their reactions after the inseparable pair were caught in a suicide bomber’s ugly web of hatred leaving the Ariana Grande concert.
“Volunteer your time and labour or donate to a homeless shelter. Tell them Chrissy sent you,” was Archibald’s parents’ reaction.
And, in a remarkable outpouring of support, thousands are doing exactly that: volunteering and donating in her name as the hashtag #chrissysentme goes viral.
We need this collective reassurance of our humanity that such generosity of spirit provides. It reminds us not all is anger and hatred in our world.
Yet in others, there’s a depth of darkness acknowledging neither restraint nor reason. Targeting children, strangers and lovers for the sick pleasure of causing as much grief as inhumanly possible is a vile manifestation.
Of course, those who wallow in this mire can never win. Neither hearts nor minds bend to such philosophy. They are up against something so vast and powerful, it’s beyond their comprehension. The simple words of grieving parents, lovers and friends sweep away the toxic debris as penicillin destroys virulent bacteria. Mankind would never have made it this far were that not the case.
But that doesn’t excuse laxity by those we choose to protect and serve us. I don’t mean the police and medics, who run towards violence as we run away. No, it’s the politicians we’ve elected who need to display courage and not hide behind flowery rhetoric, bowed heads and offers of condolence. That’s the easy part.
How to stop this mayhem? How to balance individual rights with our common good? How to keep us safe without erecting a cage? No, not easy at all.
Yet, we have a prime minister who wanders away, camera in hand, distancing himself from any true discussion of national security and the potential trade-offs involved. Then, he tweets everyone’s welcome in Canada.
Oh yes? Maybe Salman Abedi, Youssef Zaghba, Khuram Butt and Rachid Redouane would have been welcome too?
These are tough issues. How to allow needed immigration as well as offering humanitarian help to desperate refugees, yet still calm the safety anxieties of ordinary Canadians.
Oh, so it can’t happen here? Sorry, that plane already flew — look back to June 1985 and the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in which 329 people died. That wickedness originated right here in good, old Canada; though, given the atrocious bungling of the subsequent investigation, both Ottawa and the RCMP prefer not to talk about it.
We can do better. We must before it’s too late.