I watched with glee while your kings and queens fought for ten decades for the Gods they made. I shouted out "Who killed the Kennedys" when after all, it was you and me.
So history repeats itself. Again. When the Rolling Stones recorded Sympathy for the Devil in 1968, the line read "Who killed Kennedy", until the band heard about the death of the second Kennedy, Robert, on June 6th, 1968.
As for the other song that inspired this, "Le démon sort de l'enfer", I heard it for the first time at a show about Quebec culture that was postponed but should have originally been set in New York, on a fateful September 11th, 2001.
Similarly, panel four should have just shown the twin towers...then what happened in Ottawa... happened: a pure laine born and raised in Canada strapped on a phentex beard, called himself a jihadist and killed a soldier in Ottawa.
Canada was stricken, There is a movement of grief, but it pales in comparison to the US after 9/11. In fact, my facebook feed has seen more conspiracy theories on the matter than touching pictures, for two reasons:
1: Canada is not the US and certainly not a bite-sized European country! It is one tenth of the american population, scattered around an even bigger territory. People from Halifax will never see Vancouver. Most Canadians from Edmonton will never see Montreal. That distance makes people identify themselves more as Albertans, Quebeckers, Acadians, Newfoundlanders or First Nations before they consider themselves Canadians. Add to that the fact that most of our symbols of government like the monarchy, our army, the governor general and the Senate, are direct hand me downs from the British colonial systems that we did not create through a reform or revolution (like the americans), people do not relate to their central government as much as americans do. In fact, you can't swing a dead cat in Canada without hitting someone who sees Ottawa as an oppressor of their province or culture.
2: We have been there before and we don't want to go back. After 9/11, people were guilt tripped into being "patriotic", to "believe in their country" while in the end, it really meant "believe in the republican party". It was used as a rallying cry to throw the United States in the war in Iraq that's still haunting us ten years on.
"Lost of innocence"
Some, especially americans, said that Canada lost its innocence. Wrong. Understand us well; we always knew that a gun battle could happen in our capital. We just never thought it's worth living in cages. Canada only looks innocent from the outside. When you really know the national history, when did Canada lost its innocence?
Was it in 1970, when the Quebec separatists of the FLQ kidnapped James Cross and Pierre Laporte? The usually smarter than that Pierre Trudeau lanched the war measures act, imprisoned artists and union leaders, launched the army on Montreal.
Was it in 1990 in Oka, when the army was called in against a mohawk band over a stupid golf course?
Was it 1989, when Marc Lépine walked into l'École Polytechnique and made not one victim but fourteen?
Was it when we found out that Robert Pickton threw the bodies of the women he murdered with pig parts on his farm?
Or was it when people like general Romeo Dallaire dared to talk about the corpses rotting in the sun in Rwanda, casualties of our proxy wars, and put a face on the post-traumatic stress disorder that our soldiers bring back from abroad?
Having been part of two major colonial empires left Canada with a pretty large extended family. On top of receiving immigration from Latin America (we're on the same continent, after all), we also receive immigrants from places like north and central Africa through la Francophonie and the indian subcontinent through the Commonwealth. Those people come to our universities, work in the same place as we do, they live with us and if they are willing to talk and you are willing to listen, you get stories of "surgical" war that you will not hear on CNN. Personally, I had the chance to talk with immigrants from El Salvador, Somalia and Algeria on the past conflicts there but one memory is especially striking...
It was in 2004, at the Université de Moncton. My first year there. Dallaire was not yet a household name and the Rwanda genocide was curiously one of the few events of the past ten years that I had read nothing about. I had a neighbor who was from there and explained me the whole thing. I did not ask any questions on how he got like that, but one sleeve of his coat was always dangling, empty and his other hand was a plastic prosthetic. He also had burned skin on his face. I did not ask his age, but he was roughly the same age as me and I was 7 in 1993.
So who is really innocent? Is it the one who does not care if a firecracker goes off in his house, or the one who does not know the bloodbath happening next door?
Okay, okay, there are times when there is no other choice but to do war. Rwanda, 1993 is a good example of what happens when people don't get involved but should. Dallaire himself is in favor of an intervention against ISIL (and one of the few pro-intervention people that I take seriously as what he knows about war, he did not learned from playing Call of Duty!). Sometimes, a country has to go to war, but you never do it without thinking very carefully. No pointless chest-thumping, remember that your opponent is as human as you, not a savage and, for goodness' sake, if the strategy you plan to use already failed in that area twice before, then change your darn strategy!
That's the Canada I know, love and draw. That's the Canada I grew up in. It thinks twice. It knows what it's like to be a colony because in many regards, it is still one and when it can't keep massacres from happening, it can still offer a new life to those who want to start over here, like a warm cabin in the snow storm without discrimination based on religion, skin color, language, culture, gender or sexual orientation. After all, it is very often to fill our gas tanks, fill our coffee cups and keep rare earths in our cell phones that conflicts happen. We should be flattered that so many immigrants choose to come here. Well, I am flattered when I hear some of my immigrant co-workers (many of which are muslims, by the way), say that Canada is more tolerant than the United States or even France.
In other words, the Canada I know is not at all what the conservatives make of it. Don't guilt trip me, I know the difference. If the attacks in Ottawa results in another half-assed intervention in the Middle East, or results in some Patriot Act, Canadian edition, if fear silences artists and reporters that are critical of the party in office, if we close our boundaries and hearts to our Commonwealth and Francophonie brothers out of fear, then we will have killed the very soul of Canada to avenge what it is, without all that, just an empty building.
