When TERROR comes to town
This is what I thought after I heard a couple dozen cop cars tear past my window on Saturday night, upon learning that a crazed killer was on the run from police and had left behind an ISIL flag: “Well, (unprintable word), I guess it’s our turn now.” If you live in a big city, you know yours is coming, too. Terrorism is endemic now.
This is not to say that terrorism has grown objectively worse, or even that it is a very great practical nuisance, except in airports. The point is merely that it has a viral, random, and dispersed nature, and might manifest itself anywhere. Even at a far-flung fagend of civilization.
We haven’t been told much about the perpetrator of the attempted vehicular attack on Edmonton. And the truth is, it is hard to imagine caring about or learning anything meaningful from the details. Twenty years ago an incident of this sort would have set off an agony of localized soul-searching. We would have been desperate to examine the social, ethnic and religious connections of the would-be killer. We would have felt real dread at the possibility that he was merely the first in a sequence.
And probably there would have been some quiet, harsh self-interrogation. What made him so angry at this city? To what flaws in us was he reacting? Which of our social sins made him so desperate and nihilistic?
Time has let us off the hook. Surely no one is seriously asking “Why Edmonton?”, except perhaps in the sense one would say “Why bother?” After a thousand indistinguishable headlines from everywhere, we have all abandoned the quest for “root causes” that tie a terrorist tantrum-thrower to a particular physical community. A loner or damaged person can find and consume all the insanity his swollen mind will hold by means of the internet.
The Edmonton attacker has been identified as a Somali refugee, but we know it is impossible that he was actually armed by some Somali terror group with expatriate tendrils: he was not armed. When local Somali and Muslim groups declared that the suspect in custody was not wellknown to them, I realized it had not occurred to me to wonder about that. Would anyone who had conferred with one other person choose this weird method of perpetrating terrorism? Run over a policeman outside a football stadium... during the third quarter of a game? Pass through a police checkpoint in a rented truck (having left a conscious witness behind), hand over his ID, and hope for the best? Leave an area full of crowded sports bars in order to lead a chase to a nightclub two and a half miles away?
This isn’t a terror plan: this is lame, possibly drunken Saturday night improvisation with lethal intentions. Believe me, I grew up with people who have done worse without meaning any harm.
This outburst has inflicted life-altering trauma on a few innocent people — even the brave policeman who unwittingly became the star in a grotesque, silent-movie stunt is sure to face serious physical and psychological consequences. But if this is the best that homegrown Canadian terrorists can do now, we can handle it, both socially and logistically. (This weekend certainly was not in any sense Edmonton’s most violent of 2017.)
It definitely gives us no reason to be suspicious of or angry at our Muslim or Somali neighbours. When I heard the police cars and had the thought, “It’s our turn now,” it was not just terrorist violence I was thinking of. My mind was racing ahead to all the emotional theatre that always follows such an act: the sentimental salutes to the Edmonton spirit, the calls to “stand together” against an effort to “divide us.”
I can report that this business is as awkward and embarrassing as you might imagine, if your city has not yet had its turn. Over the next day I kept thinking: this incident had real individual victims, with real injuries that show up on a real MRI. Talk of “Edmonton” having to react or defend itself seemed like inappropriate, obtrusive, self-glamorizing poetry.
It struck me as being a lot like saying, “Golly, that could have been me!” before the blood had congealed. I cross Jasper Avenue late at night quite a bit, so I suppose I am entitled, on statistical grounds, to say, “That could have been me.” I merely lack whatever instinct, good or bad, would make me express it.
But perhaps the icky, spasmodic rituals do have a function, and the fault is mine. (Or, to put it in fashionable language, perhaps it is a function of privilege.) A little girl showed up at a Sunday evening rally at Churchill Square with a handmade sign reading, “We are Muslim, not ISIS.” If she is growing up thinking she has to point this out, that is just about the saddest, most infuriating thing I can imagine.
Edmonton has not just been home to Muslims for many decades (it had a mosque 30 years before Toronto did); Muslims have been an accepted part of its cultural and political life for longer than anyone can remember.
I will happily bet you that there are still northern Alberta farmers who have never exchanged two words with any black person, but who go to the same Muslim accountant of Lebanese or Syrian origin that their father did. There was a time when the possibility of a “division” in my world, with Muslims on an opposite side of it, would never have occurred to me as an Edmonton native.
I suppose the thing to say is that I still have not learned to perceive the seam between us that is there to be ripped open or exploited. Of course we “stand together” with Muslims. Much of the time Edmonton, cold and utilitarian, presents itself to us as a laborious, common predicament, even a trap. We do not just stand together: we are huddled together against Nature, practitioners of a civil religion involving block heaters and boot rooms and Thermoses full of coffee. If you live this way, explicit talk of togetherness and community can feel like a faux pas. No doubt the truth is that I would just prefer to fast-forward to a time when we can do without it again.
SURELY NO ONE IS SERIOUSLY ASKING ‘WHY EDMONTON?’