Why do we need to define a tragedy?
Define it. Define him. Define us.
These seemed to be the three morally urgent stages of how we first dealt, individually and as a city — a large sprawling and diverse one at that — with Monday’s horrific van attack in North York.
On the kind of sunny spring day we’ve longed for, a young man driving a white rental van allegedly plowed through pedestrians, killing 10 and seriously injuring another 14.
But with details flowing in, victims being slowly identified, and charges now laid against the alleged driver, Alek Minassian, 25 — facing 10 counts of murder and 13 of attempted murder — what strikes me is our immediate need for definition, as if once we settle on what this “incident” is, and who its perpetrator may be, we can contain our fear, focus on our city’s good qualities, and get on with the healing.
Alas, it’s not nearly so easy. We may be able to describe the event, but we’re only beginning to grasp who the accused is — and even then there is still so much to sort through.
The details ranged from information he very briefly joined the Armed Forces, to a chilling report that, based on his own Facebook post just before the attack, now deleted, he identified with a misogynistic online group of “incels” — involuntary celibates — men who feel frustrated by their inability to find romantic relationships or sex.
Cue the online social theorizing, everything from young men need to be taught that “young women don’t owe them sex,” to references to the 1989 mass shooting of 14 female engineering students at Montreal’s L’Ecole Polytechnique.
Don’t misunderstand. Every bit of it may well be grimly pertinent. It’s just too soon in the immediate aftermath to call it.
I prefer to heed the wise words of Jamil Jivani, Toronto community organizer and author of the just released book Why Young Men: Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity. Jivani makes the case in his book that “across the Western world, an increasing number of young men are feeling disconnected from the countries they call home.” They fall prey to “negative or destructive influences.”
You can’t argue with that. Nor Jivani’s thoughts expressed on CBC Radio’s Metro Morning that we should take our time to discuss this violent crime and city tragedy.
He tweeted: “This is the part after tragedy when we look for political angles. And many hope the perpetrator has as little in common with themselves as possible so your identity group isn’t unfairly implicated.”
His advice? “Let yourself be sad, mourn the lives lost and wait for the facts.”
But, along with the grieving for victims we are only beginning to learn about, we can’t get quickly enough to the definition of us, the one that comforts us most.
“This is not who we are,” I heard so many people — including some of our leaders — say.
I was having a brief exchange on Twitter with this woman, Jeanne, and she didn’t feel, on the bleak morning after the attack, “that those representing us are relaying the depth of what has happened up here!”
You could certainly understand what she meant in a larger emotional sense.
Perhaps there is no way to capture the depth of it all.
We tried with words, searching on social media for the correct term to describe what happened — an attack filled with terror but perhaps not terrorism. A strange parsing.
We tried with flowers and cards at a growing memorial to the victims — “We don’t know you, but we love you” — near the crash site, and with expressions of our feelings to forge a connection, not just to the grief of those directly affected, but to our civic sense of outrage, solidarity and resilience.
One of the stunning things most of us realize when we privately lose someone we love, when we’re first shattered, is that life relentlessly goes on around us. Have you ever looked out of a car window on your way to a significant funeral and marvelled that everyone on the street hasn’t stopped what they were doing?
It’s different when you lose a beautiful daughter like Anne Marie D’Amico, a vibrant grandmother like Dorothy Sewell, a talented chef like Chul Min “Eddie” Kang, to a widely traumatizing public act of violence. The community does stop and grieve with you.
Society has become very good at this public grieving and it is not insignificant. Our donations and kind gestures acknowledge the terrible pain, the deeply arbitrary and unfair loss.
Families devastated, want the world to know just who they’ve lost to history.
The dismal truth is Toronto has joined a club we never wanted to belong to.
We’ve seen this weaponized vehicle before, sometimes a different size or colour, in European cities — Nice, Barcelona, London — leaving citizens dead and devastated by drivers with similar intent if not motive. To kill and to maim, to punish those for just living and enjoying their lives.
But unfortunately it’s now a part of who we are. It is us.
I have, since 9/11, always assumed that any act of homegrown violence or international terrorism that happened elsewhere could happen here. Why should we be exempt? Are we not part of the modern world?
A text in the night from my daughter put it into perspective. She lives in Paris, and for the past few years, it has been her worried parents calling and sending her a message in the wake of horrific attacks: “Are you OK?”
This time, even though we don’t live near the scene of the van attack, the questions were for us: “Are you guys OK? And everyone in the family?”
This is the modern world.
Judith Timson is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @judithtimson.