Opinion with Michael Coren In April, a terrible, tragic massacre occurred in Toronto when a van was driven through crowded sidewalks, killing 10 people and injuring a further 16. What can be said about such a grotesque, pointless crime; what words can possibly communicate the way we feel? That our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, that we are in shock or tears, that we should all hug one another? Much of that might be true, but I’m not sure what is achieved by making our feelings so public. It’s easy to play the cynic in all of this, but the one absolute is that when such tragedies occur – and, alas, they frequently do, and will continue to do so – it is the dead, the wounded and their loved ones who matter. The rest of us are simply not the story. Sometimes, that doesn’t appear to be the case. More than 30 years ago, I reported from the bloody and violent conflict in Northern Ireland and saw terrible violence and suffering first-hand. On one occasion, someone was shot dead just a few steps away from me. It took almost 48 hours for me to react and, when I did, I sat in my hotel room and shook and sobbed. As awful as all of this is, however, life does reset astoundingly quickly. That, whether we like it or not, is the reality of howwe work and function as people. So when reporters constantly ask people with no direct involvement in a tragedy how they feel, and demand to know what the event and the trauma means to them, we must ask whether this is easing the situation, aiding the victims, or merely magnifying public emotion for its own sake. Of course I care, of course I feel, but I’mnot sure if genuine compassion and meaningful empathy are helped or hindered by this culture of public grieving. Wounds never heal if we constantly scratch away at them, especially when there is absolutely no point in doing so. When Princess Diana died in 1997, for example, Britain sank into paroxysms of sorrow. It was indeed genuinely terrible that a young woman, a mother of small children, should die like that. But this mass reaction was for someone whommost people had never met and knew only through media or fantasy. I hosted a radio show at the time and, while expressing sympathy for Diana and her family, mentioned a story from London in which a person had died, and none of the neighbours even knew or noticed for almost a month! Real community and genuine fraternity, I suggested, are about caring for all and not concentrating love on one lionized figure. Sorrow for the glamorous and the famous might not be real sorrow at all. The general reaction to what I said was extraordinary. I was criticized for being uncaring and hard, when in fact all I was doing was asking for a reasonable, balanced response to the trauma and pain of loss. Do we grieve because we care about others, or because we care about ourselves? That might be a politically incorrect question, but it needs to be asked. Self-analysis may be painful, but that doesn’t make it wrong. The Toronto horror and the terrorist attacks and U.S. shootings are different from the death of Princess Diana, of course, but our reaction to them still provokes some fundamental questions: do we react the same way when countless innocent people are murdered in the Middle East, and do we show such emotion when yet another homeless person dies on the street? I think that we know the answer. Part of the problem is that we’ve often forgotten how to grieve. The decline of organized religion has removed much of that collective solidarity, whether it’s the Roman Catholic wake, the Jewish sitting shiva, or any other ordered process of trying to deal with passing. Politicians mouthing words about thoughts and prayers, or television cameras thrusting into crowds of onlookers just isn’t the same. Emotion is a good thing, but emotionalism is not; and false tears for the sake of appearance are positively awful. Please grieve, please feel, and please share in the pain of others. But do so for all people and in appropriate and suitable proportion. And never forget that it’s never about us, it’s always about them, no matter what the culture and the media might expect. They are the ones who matter. 18 | www.snowbirds.org
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