Everybody cries: Sneering at grief is about as low as you can get

Veteran columnist should have known better

I was genuinely taken aback. A Toronto Sun columnist who should have known better mockingly tweeted a list of the times Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had cried in public. It was labelled #TrudeauCried. Hashtags like that magnetize hate on Twitter.

The list began with Trudeau crying at his father Pierre’s funeral. Then at Auschwitz. At the Quebec City mosque shooting victims’ funeral. At the death of Gord Downie. At meeting Syrian refugee kids. While apologizing for residential schools. While apologizing to LGBTQ2S people in Canada.

The list was nasty. Even Fox News rarely goes this far.

Adults shouldn’t talk this way. We tell small children not to. It’s like Trump waving his arms about, mocking a disabled reporter for having arthrogryposis, which limits his joint movements, or mocking John McCain for having been captured in Vietnam and then for having terminal brain cancer.

The columnist was Lorrie Goldstein, which made it worse. I worked with Goldstein many years ago and he was a kind person in a very rough newsroom. He often used the phrase, “to be fair.” He gave moral thought to things. He asked us if we thought the word “feminazi” was too strong and decided not to use it. He would take a disabled person — a young man who had great difficulty speaking — out for lunch. Lorrie said ill-considered things, as we all do, but he had no bullying in him.

Still, life happens. It pounds at a person. As the years advance, you have to decide what kind of person you will age into, either open to the world and kind, or closed-off, embittered and angry.

So. Imagine that you’ve let yourself become the kind of person who mocks people for crying at the death of family, of murder victims, of Jewish victims at the scene of the worst crime humans have ever committed. Small children who could have died by poison gas in Syria are hopping around Pearson Airport, but you mock those who are moved to tears. Many Canadians cried at Gord Downie’s death but you don’t really care for music, do you.

Later, Goldstein apologized for having mocked Trudeau for the first two, which just made things worse. Goldstein would allow that Trudeau might have sincerely grieved over his father’s death and the Holocaust. But he left every other harsh conclusion intact.

I imagine Trudeau cried when he heard of his younger brother Michel’s horrible skiing death in an avalanche. That sorrow helped destroy Pierre Trudeau’s will to live. He and Margaret were ravaged by grief. Were they all just showing off ?

Goldstein didn’t apologize for sneering at Trudeau’s grief at the funeral of victims of a mass murder though, as if Trudeau could not possibly be sincerely stricken by the slaughter of Muslims.

Equally, why could anyone cry at children torn from their parents’ arms and sent to faraway schools to be abused by priests? The Americans do that now. Melania “really doesn’t care. Do U?”

I’m being sarcastic here. I don’t know what Goldstein feels. But he might consider that even if he thinks Trudeau was faking the tears that ran down his face — maybe the PM’s photographer, Adam Scotti, was peeling onions .

Modern men are changing. They’re spending more time with family, have comforted female friends enduring sexual harassment, and speak openly about their feelings. Goldstein’s Twitter followers might be using Trudeau’s tears to hide other more high-school resentments of him: his relative youth, or his openly expressing love for Sophie and their children. Kayaking. Running. Dressing well. Maybe he drinks craft beer instead of buck-a.

Even judges cry, as in one recent B.C. case where the victim’s statement in a pedophilia case was terribly upsetting. The judge is now considering whether to recuse herself. She shouldn’t. Everybody hurts sometimes. Everybody cries.