It turns out that my great-nephew spent two hours holed up in a classroom in Dawson College yesterday while a nut was shooting up his school and his classmates. He's fine, physically anyway, and his girlfriend who also attends the college was off campus when the shooting began.
I tried to think of something profound to say about the nature of violence in our society but I've come up blank. We are violent; we are hunters, predators, meateaters. And some of us can't seem to get beyond that. But why should we when our leaders can't see beyond that, either? When the answer to every international crisis is to threaten force, to use force, to bomb innocents, to invade sovreign nations, to lock people away, to execute, to intimidate, to torture.
Perhaps violence is the nature of our society.
Well, being 4000 miles and three time zones away from the shooting, no, I wasn't particularly afraid. And I was at work, so I was only getting periodic updates on the story on the internet. I didn't even realize at the time that that was the school my great-nephew attends. But I was born in Montréal and even though I moved away 35 years ago, some of the streets I saw in the tv coverage looked familiar and that left a strange feeling, seeing blood on streets I walked down as a child.
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