Frozen in the headlights

The Canadian Press
Published Friday, July 15, 2016 12:39PM EDT
Last Updated Friday, July 15, 2016 1:09PM EDT

http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/pm-trudeau-says-canada-will-work-to-fight-terrorism-1.2988472

CALGARY -- Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada is thinking of "our friends in France" and will work to fight terrorism.

"We had a terrible attack last night and our hearts go out to the victims and their families," Trudeau said Friday while in Calgary to attend the Stampede.

"Canada stands with France as a steadfast ally and we will work with the international community to fight terror to ensure that we live in a peaceful world."

There were no reports of Canadian casualties. At least 84 people were killed when a truck full of weapons plowed into a crowd of Bastille Day revellers in the French resort city of Nice late Thursday.

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said the federal government has no information that would necessitate a change in Canada's terror threat level, which is currently at medium.

Still, Goodale urged Canadians to stay vigilant and alert.

"Canadians can rest assured that when the security and intelligence sector receives credible warnings on a specific threat, they work with the appropriate government partners to ensure the safety of Canadians," Goodale said in a statement.

Goodale noted that while in Paris in January, he signed a declaration with his French counterpart, Bernard Cazeneuve, to work together on terrorism, organized crime and irregular migration.

OK. I'm not saying these guys are bad. I'm not even saying these guys are negligent or don't know how to do their jobs.

I just think these guys have run out of things to say.

I think they're having a harder and harder time helping Canadians feel safe. It's no longer going to work telling us they'll be sure to to warn us if something bad is about to happen.

There were no such warnings in Nice.

There was only a split-second of "warning", then chaos and death as 84 people were ploughed down, their lives ended in mid-breath. Nobody expected it except the killer.

So Justin Trudeau is called upon to, as usual, say a few words aboaut the latest atrocity. And this from the Calgary Stampede! I'm not against the Calgary Stampede, though I really hate how the chuckwagon races seem to kill at least a few horses every year.

But it's the juxtaposition. Horrendous carnage. Calgary Stampede. And bland, predictable words from the son of a "great" Prime Minister who was vilified all during his very long tenure (which was very long ago).

We grab at the familiar, in hope. We gasp for reassurance.

None of us gets a warning. We don't.

Many people are now thoroughly sick of "our thoughts and prayers go out to --- ", especially with regards to mass shootings. But this has become an "insert atrocity here" statement, and we're hearing it practically every week.

My daughter, a seasoned TV newswoman, believes the world is doomed. It was alarming to hear her talk yesterday. In my worst moments, I agree with her, though even in my own blog I have to be careful how I write about it. Of course it can be said that she's right up against it every day, reporting on all the worst stuff that happens worldwide.

But the worst is getting worse. The bland is getting REALLY bland, and stretched pretty thin.

If a real disaster happened in Canada, I'm not sure how Justin Trudeau would handle it.

"He's like a deer in the headlights," my husband likes to say.

Let us hope we never find out. But how can we know for sure?

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Things fall apart: thoughts on the attack on Paris

This started out as a journal entry, then evolved from there. I have been known to delete posts that I later thought were too negative, just because I'd rather not put out that kind of energy. But today it's too much. I wonder now what it takes to go on about your business being cheerful and saying, "Yes, isn't it too bad." The feeling is, "if we feel gloomy the terrorists have won" and "everything happens for a reason" (!). This is about as helpful as saying "crying won't bring him back" and other stone-hearted, sappy bromides that are supposed to be so damn helpful. Our grief is being hijacked along with everything else. Put on a happy face. The problem is, I just can't do it any more.

November 14/15

Horrible terrorist attack in Paris yesterday. Out of the blue, seemingly. This stuff is popping up everywhere and makes me feel sick inside, like climate change. I wonder about the future, what kind of hell it might be for the grandkids, such wonderful souls. Irreplaceable. It could be a worse hell than the world has ever seen. People say things like, “oh, the human race has always kept going no matter what happens,” as if that's some kind of insurance policy against disaster.

Because something has been (more or less) true in the past does NOT mean it will be true in the future: in fact, the more time goes by, the higher the odds it will change. Example: "I’ve smoked cigarettes for 40 years and it hasn’t hurt me." That means you can go on for another 40 and be OK! It means that if it hasn’t happened YET, it will never happen, and CAN never happen, which is the stupidest piece of flawed non-logic I’ve ever seen. But I see it every single day, and people believe it, blandly, sticking a happy face on atrocity, which only leaves the door open for it to continue. It’s just a little thing called denial.

I never know how to get my head around all this, or how to feel. Things seem to be coming apart. When will it end? Nuclear war, I think. As if that threat is no longer there! Then the climate will truly collapse - it won't take more than a tiny nudge - and there will be no food. No food is already a huge one, along with where to live when everything is underwater. No food means riots and people tearing each other’s throats out to survive. Humans will revert to the pack mentality from which they sprang, devolving from apes into something somewhat less than that.

I have a purpose in my life, I am very clear about it and have no doubt of it, and that is to be love to my grandchildren. BE love, not just show love. This is nothing grand, but I don’t have to think about it either. It is as natural as breathing and has been the crown of my life after decades of wretched struggle. So many times I have wanted to end my life, but it looks as if it may be taken out of my hands.

At these times, anxious times, I look at my health and the fact that things have not been quite right for a long time. I had abdominal symptoms, quite severe ones that drove me to the doctor, something I only do under duress because I hate doctors. As usual, her attitude was dismissive, but she did delegate, as all doctors do now. I saw a gynaecologist, a urologist, a gastroenterologist, had two CT scans, two mammograms, a colonoscopy, and they supposedly found nothing. More than three years after being told my colonoscopy was completely normal (though my doctor was supposed to “go over the results” with me, an appointment which turned out to be totally useless because she said “there’s nothing to talk about”, as if this was a waste of her time), she was leafing through my chart and said, “Oh.”

Now, you never want to hear your doctor say, “Oh.”

The “oh” turned out to be the results of the colonoscopy. The polyp they found, the one they never told me about and which my doctor either didn't notice or didn't bother to mention, was not a large one, and not cancerous, but these things can turn cancerous in the future. Other things were wrong inside me that may or may not be a problem later, and which might lead to heavy bleeding or perhaps something worse than that.

My colonoscopy was not completely normal, as the technicians told me it was, but my doctor vagued me away because she didn’t really bother to look at the results.

OK, I don’t want to be one of these cranky old ladies who goes on and on about her health. For the most part I don’t talk about it at all because deep down, I don’t think I have much time left. In only a few months, without conscious effort, I have lost well over 30 pounds, and most of it dropped off me in almost alarming fashion. I was weight-obsessed from age 15 on, though I was never more than 15 or 20 pounds overweight (considered huge by the standards of the day). Thus began a siege on my body that left my metabolism permanently confused, if not completely fucked.

I ruined my body, in a sense, meaning there was a lot of fluctuation, some of it quite dramatic, and some really stupid diets, one of which left me 15 pounds underweight. I’ve never had so many compliments on my appearance in my life (oh, wait – there was that manic episode, the one that nearly killed me, when I supposedly looked 10 years younger! And certainly, if you look ten years younger, you no longer need to keep taking those stupid pills.)

So now my weight plummets, just from cutting out junk food. It’s still going down. I feel a vague nausea and my appetite is definitely down. So, do I go back to that doctor and say, “I’ve lost weight”, especially when she warned me I needed to lose weight and was verging on obesity? She'd probably say, "You look marvelous," and tell me there's nothing wrong.

This is why I don't want to go. Do I invite that familiar leaning forward and peering at me with puckered brow, then suddenly sitting up straight and saying in a decisive voice, “Nope. Can’t find anything”?

No.

Sometimes I think (to try to connect these thoughts together) that all of this is a death-march, that we just have to sing our marching songs as we go our merry way. I mainly want to stay around to help with the grandkids, if they survive. I am not yet sure of the nature of the disaster. Climate change experts are saying it could happen more catastrophically than anyone expects. It could all come apart, suddenly give way, as it seems to be already. Right now denial holds it all tenuously together, so that every extreme flood, every sinkhole swallowing up houses, every freak snowstorm or raging forest fire after a baffling drought is considered a separate event.

I get a queasy feeling from it all. When the food runs out. When the terrorists come HERE, not to France, not even to the United States but here. Don’t think about it, your health is bad enough. Die now? Might be a good idea, but it would upset my family, I think. 

I am too much of a coward to face the kind of world that is coming. So if “something” wants to carry me off, maybe it’s a lot more benevolent than it seems on the surface. What will be will be, but we always assume the people who mean the most to us will be spared. And that is the greatest uncertainty of all.

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For the people of Paris: La Derniere Classe

La Derniere Classe: The Last Class

From Contes du Lundi by Alphonse Daudet

Told by a little Alsatian

This morning I was very late getting to school and I was afraid of being scolded because M. Hamel had said he would be quizzing us on the participles and I didn’t know the first word. It occurred to me that I might skip class and run afield. The day was warm and bright, the blackbirds were whistling at the edge of the woods, and in the meadow behind the sawmill the Prussians were practicing. Everything seemed much nicer than the rule of participles; but I resisted the urge and hurried toward school.

Passing the town hall, I saw a group of people gathered in front of the notice board. For the past two years that has been where we’ve gotten all the bad news, the battles lost, the demands, the commands; and I thought without stopping: “What now?” Then as I ran by, the blacksmith Wachter, who was there with his apprentice reading the postings, called to me: “Don’t rush, boy; you have plenty of time to get to school!” I thought he was teasing me, and I was out of breath as I reached M. Hamel’s.

Normally, when class starts, there is noise enough to be heard from the street as desks are opened and shut, students repeat lessons together and loudly with hands over ears to learn better, and the teacher’s big ruler knocking on the tables: “Let’s have some quiet!” I was hoping to use the commotion to sneak into place unnoticed, but today all was silent, like a Sunday morning. Through the open window I saw my classmates already in their seats and M. Hamel, who went back and forth with his terrible iron ruler under his arm. I had to open the door and enter amidst this great calm. You can imagine how flushed and fearful I was!

But no, M. Hamel looked at me evenly and said gently: “Take your seat quickly, little Franz, we were starting without you.” I hopped the bench and sat at my desk right away. Only after I had settled in did I notice our teacher had on his fancy green coat, his ruffled shirt and the embroidered silk cap he only wore on inspection or award days. Also, the whole room seemed oddly solemn. But what surprised me most was at the back of the room where the benches were always empty now sat people of the village, quietly like us: the old Hauser with his tricorn, the former mayor, the former postmaster, and some others. Everyone looked sad; and Hauser had brought his old primer, worn at the edges, which he held open on his knees with his glasses resting on the pages.

While I was taking all this in, M. Hamel stood by his chair and in the same grave, gentle voice with which he had welcomed me told us: “Children, this is the last time I will teach the class. Orders from Berlin require that only German be taught in the schools of Alsace and Lorraine … the new teacher arrives tomorrow. Today is your last French lesson. I ask for your best attention.” These words hit me hard. Ah! Those beasts, that’s what they had posted at the town hall. My last French lesson …

Yet I hardly knew how to write! I had learned nothing! And I would learn no more! I wished now to have the lost time back, the classes missed as I hunted for eggs or went skating on the Saar! My books that I had always found so boring, so heavy to carry, my grammar text, my history of the saints—they seemed to me like old friends I couldn’t bear to abandon. It was the same with M. Hamel. The idea that he was leaving made me forget his scolding and the thumps of his ruler. Poor man!

It was in honor of this final class that he had worn his best Sunday outfit, and now I understood why the old men from the village were gathered at the rear of the class. They were there to show that they too were sorry for neglecting to attend school more. It was also a way to thank our teacher of forty years for his fine service, and to show their respect for the country that was disappearing.

I was pondering these things when I heard my name called. It was my turn to recite. What wouldn’t I have given to say that vaunted rule of participles loudly, clearly, flawlessly? Instead I tangled the first words and stood, hanging onto my desk, my heart pounding, unable to raise my head. I heard M. Hamel say: “I won’t scold you, my little Franz, you must already feel bad … That’s how it is. We always say: ‘Bah! I have time. I’ll learn “tomorrow.”’ And now you see it has come … Ah! It is Alsace’s great trouble that she always puts off learning until tomorrow. Now people will be justified in saying to us: ‘How come you pretend to be French and yet don’t know how to read or write your language!” You are not the most guilty of this, my poor Franz. We all have good reason to blame ourselves.

Your parents did not press you to learn your lessons. They’d prefer to have you work in the fields or at the mill to earn some more money. Myself, I am not blameless. Haven’t I sent you to water my garden instead of work? And when I wanted to go fishing, didn’t I give you the day off?"

Then, from one thing to another, M. Hamel spoke of the French tongue, saying it was the most beautiful language in the world, the most clear, the most sensible. That we must keep it ourselves and never forget it, because when a people if they hold onto their language it is like holding the prison key …

Then he took a grammar text and read us our lesson. I was stunned to realize how well I understood it. Everything he said seemed so easy, easy! I believe also that I had never listened so well and that he had never explained to us so patiently. One might think that the poor man wished to give us all his knowledge, to fill our heads in a single try.

After grammar, we moved on to writing. For this day, M. Hamel had prepared new examples, written in beautiful, round script: France, Alsace, France, Alsace. They looked like little flags floating about the classroom, hung from the rods atop our desks. It was something to see everyone set to our work, and so silently! The only sound was the scratching of pens on paper. Once some beetles flew in but no one paid them any attention, not even the little ones who were assiduously tracing their figures with one heart, one mind, as if this also were French … On the roof the pigeons cooed softly. When I heard them I said to myself: “Will they be forced to sing in German, too?” From time to time when I’d raise my eyes from my writing I would see M. Hamel still in his chair staring at the objects around him as if he wanted to memorize exactly how things were in the little schoolhouse.

Imagine! For forty years, he’d been in the same place with his yard before him and all the class likewise. The benches and desks were polished, worn with use; the walnut trees had grown, and the hops he’d planted himself now climbed around the windows to the roof. How heart-breaking it must be for the poor man to leave all these things, to hear his sister packing their things in the room above.

They would have to leave the country the next day, forever.

All the same, he bravely kept class to the very end. After writing, we had a history lesson, then the little ones sang together their BA BE BI BO BU. At the rear of the room, old Hauser put on his glasses and, holding his primer in both hands, chanted the letters with them. It was obviously a great effort for him; his voice trembled with emotion and it was so funny to hear him that we wanted to laugh and cry. Ah! I do remember that last class…

Suddenly the church clock struck noon. During the Angelus we could hear the Prussians’ trumpets beneath the windows as they returned from their exercises… M. Hamel rose, colorless, from his chair. Never had he appeared so large.

“My friends, say, my, I … I…” But something choked him. He couldn’t say it.

He turned to the board, took a piece of chalk and, using all of his strength, he wrote as large as he could:

“VIVE LA FRANCE!”

He stayed there, his head resting on the wall, and wordlessly used his hand to motion to us: “It’s over … you may go.”

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Attack on Ottawa: "changed, changed utterly"?

Jonathan Kay: Did one man’s attack on Parliament really change Canada ‘forever’?

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Jonathan Kay | October 24, 2014 | Last Updated: Oct 25 2:30 AM ET

Andrew Burton/Getty Images  Police guard the Canadian Parliament one day after gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau infiltrated the building before being shot dead

‘Our world has changed forever today and we don’t even know yet how much,” Canadian Senator Fabian Manning declared on Wednesday, after a shootout in the heart of Canada’s Parliament buildings, which ended with the death of rampaging gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. In an editorial entitled “The End of Innocence,” the Calgary Herald solemnly declared that “Canada will never be the same again.” “Just as America changed the moment the planes hit the Twin Towers, Canada was forever altered the moment Cpl. Nathan Cirillo was struck down [by Zehaf-Bibeau],” wrote Susan Clairmont of the Hamilton Spectator. “In the hours and days and years to come, we will know that this was a pivotal moment that we can never turn back from.”


Is all this true? Are we indeed living in a dangerous new era in which the desecration of public spaces by bullets and blood becomes a part of daily life? The promiscuous use of phrases such as “loss of innocence” and “new normal,” as well as the nation’s generally traumatized state this past week, suggest that many Canadians believe we indeed have undergone a massive and terrifying shift.
But the quantitative evidence for this is shaky — non-existent, really. The two Canadian men killed by Islamist-inspired terrorists this week were the first domestic terror casualties since 9/11. Put another way: In a single spasm of random evil, Justin Bourque produced more deaths in Moncton (three) than Islamism has yielded in all of Canada in the 13 years since 9/11. And despite the fact many Canadians worry incessantly about violent crime — not to mention spectacular but obscure threats such as Ebola and religiously motivated terrorism — our society actually has become much safer in recent decades.

In response to the Angus Reid Global survey question “In the past two years, have you yourself been a victim of crime which involved the police?” 25% of respondents answered yes in 1994; 13% in 2012; 9% in 2014. This is part of a worldwide trend. According to data presented at the University of Cambridge last month, “nations as diverse as Estonia, Hong Kong, South Africa, Poland, and Russia have seen average recorded homicide rates drop by 40% or more in the course of just 15 years.” So why do so many of us feel such a sense of fear and dread so much of the time? One theory, enunciated by countless experts, is that the ultrasafe nature of our society hasn’t extinguished our baseline level of anxiety: It simply has rendered it dormant, ready to awaken the moment some shocking stimulus (such as even a small-scale terrorist attack) jolts our brains.


Moreover, our capacity for psychologically processing human tragedy has been systematically degraded in recent generations, because so many of us go through much of our lives without experiencing any real loss. In my grandfather’s youth, it was not an unusual thing for mothers to lose one or even several infants to disease. The wars that were fought during his lifetime ground through tens of millions of human bodies. These days, on the other hand, an insane man with a dim knowledge of Islam runs screaming into Parliament with a gun and everyone suddenly declares that we are at “war.” Winnowed to nothingness by our hair-trigger sensitivities, the very word has lost all meaning.

There is another factor, too: the power of video. Literature and the spoken word can be used to bombard people with facts and arguments. But only video can transport us wholesale into a world of horror — short-circuiting our rational side, and hitting our emotional core. ISIS, surely, understands this: With just a few beheading videos, it was able to taunt the world’s most powerful nation into a new Iraq war. (The gambit seems to have turned out poorly for ISIS, but at least they get to issue the ever-popular jihadi boast that they are directly confronting the Great Satan.)


On Wednesday morning, everyone in Canada was talking about the events at Parliament Hill. But more than taking in the news by reading and listening, we were watching — focusing our attention on a short but shocking cellphone video of the moments when Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was taken down in the corridors of Parliament. It’s that video that my journalistic colleagues had in their mind when they wrote those soaring accounts of “lost innocence.”

Video does that to you: It takes you directly to the fear place inside your mind. And I think it’s largely because of video imagery — heads sawed off, planes flying into buildings, suicide bombs — that so many of us have convinced ourselves that we are living in some kind of fin-de-siècle dystopia. Without the advent of YouTube and the spread of cellphone cameras in the last decade, I doubt we would be nearly as agitated about terrorism.


In Friday’s edition of the National Post, I wrote an article comparing this week’s attack on Parliament with a very similar attack in May, 1984, when a mentally ill soldier named Denis Lortie stormed Quebec’s legislative building and killed three people before being convinced to surrender by the heroic Sergeant-at-Arms, René Jalbert. I was 15 and living in Montreal when that happened. It was a terrible event — but I don’t remember people claiming that the world as we knew it had been transformed in some existential way. It was treated as a deadly crime in an important public space, and it dominated the news for a few days, but then life moved on, as it must.

As it happens, Lortie’s invasion of the legislative building, and Jalbert’s heroic intervention, were recorded on a fixed-mounted video camera. You can see the whole thing below. But that video was released to the public only after the passage of a full year. That was the way things were done back then: Such shocking images were reserved first for police inquiries, court proceedings and only eventually (as in this case) CBC documentaries. By the time the public saw it, the first bloom of the event’s terror already was dead.


This week, by contrast, the video was uploaded to the whole world within minutes. We took in the fear before we could process the facts. And therein lies the source of so much of our anxiety.

The Bill and Lenny Show: bring on the comic relief!

This has, somehow, been a very strange week, and it's even stranger that it would end this way: sitting in my office at midnight trying to stifle guffaws so my husband won't wake up.

This has got to be one of the funniest things I've ever seen. These guys are like two bratty little boys with very high IQs. They answer the questions (sort of) before they're even asked, or don't answer them at all but go off on bizarre tangents. You know of course that I have a thing for Shatner, which is odd because when the series was originally on, I was a Spock fanatic and nearly kvelled in that episode where he had his shirt off. (Who knew? His body was about a gazillion times sexier than Kirk's.)

But now things swing around, and it's hard to believe these two guys are almost exactly the same age, only a few days apart in fact. Shatner has decided not to age, and has this spooky thing where, behind that ruddy outdoorsmen's face, the much younger Shatner can peer out at you with those invincible, exotic wolf eyes. It's unnerving. Nimoy has become extremely thin and has not enjoyed good health, but he is sharp and cranky and funny as hell. Very Jewish, of course, but he also brings out Shatner's Jewishness (which some people are surprised to hear about  - he was born and raised in Montreal).

This is partly an artful dodge because this week has been so difficult. It has passed in a sort of dream. Terrorism has knocked down the front door in this country, and though it has not yet entered the building, it has now suddenly become "thinkable". The threat came from within, which is especially sickening: lost, confused, vulnerable, drug-addled and/or mentally ill young people are being coerced and seduced by pure evil. This complete absence of a moral compass scares me. It also scares me that, while we revile these people and rejoice when they are shot dead, we never think about their parents, their siblings, their friends, the people who loved them and may have tried to help.

If I even mentioned this on Facebook, I'd likely be slaughtered. This man was evil, therefore his parents must be evil! His siblings must be evil. Anyone who loved, or tried to love this broken human being is evil, and we know this for a fact so there will be no more discussion about it, ever.

I am also hearing, over and over again, variations on "he converted to Islam AND. . ." (began murdering people, blowing things up, etc.) In my mind, "he converted to Islam BUT" would make more sense, or "he WAS converted to a distorted, perverted, sick and twisted form of indoctrination which has co-opted the symbolism of Islam to its own vile purposes." Or words to that effect.

So what is all this doing under a hilarious, tear-wiping, even ridiculous ten-minute sit-down routine by two of our best-known cultural icons? I have no idea, except that I needed something to get that bad taste out of my mouth. I don't ever want Shatner to die because he just keeps going on and on without even changing very much year to year, just indomitable, somewhat tank-like to be sure, but with the same vitality he had 30 or 40 years ago. I want someone to remind me that it is possible to not only keep going, but to keep projects going in every direction without slowing down, with no seeming ill effects. Some people say he's an arrogant asshole, but he doesn't care and neither do I.

So I have to go to bed now, still feeling disoriented, and now wondering about the parents and loved ones of that man who fell dead after committing such an atrocity. I'm not much of a praying person any more because I grew tired of the futility of it, but if I DID pray I would. And maybe I still will.