Surprises where no surprises need be

I was really surprised, and surprised at being surprised, at the number of people (especially among my Facebook friends) who expressed surprise that a thing like the shootings at the P.Q. rally the other night in Montreal could happen in Canada. They seemed to think it was some weird American contamination of our Northern purity. What crap.

Being Canadian is a whole bunch of ways of being human, within a set of national boundaries and travelling assumptions. But let's not be so naive as to try to deny or escape the fact that Canadians are heir to all the strengths and weaknesses of human nature. We are not and never have been some special case island of moral rectitude, too pure to jaywalk, let alone own or hold guns, let alone shoot something or someone with them. Does no one read history anymore?

(I know our Prime Minister and our Minister of Finance like us to think they have walled us off from the economic mess much of the rest of the world is in--but that's probably wishful thinking, too.)

We--we humans, that is, not just we Canadians--seem to have this capacity for thinking that our special way or our special ways of being human are the right ways, the paths to something everyone should be following towards. And when someone with whom we share some identity or identification (middle-aged Anglo-Canadian Quebecer, for example) does something "unusual," or even perhaps criminal, we find our path defiled, and have to assign the blame to some extra-territorial cause. Or to insanity, especially if the perp claims or seems to claim to be acting in our name.

The cause is within ourselves, folks. Maybe that's what really scares us. Not all the would-be pro- or anti-separatism assassins are Quebecois-speaking, bearded FLQers from the Sixties and Seventies. This act and the shouted claim to be among the waking (I typoed "wanking," first time, and wonder now if I shouldn't have left it that way) Anglos is maybe an exaggeration of a lot of Rest-of-Canada attitudes, but it goes only a bit farther in a direction a lot of Comments were already tending (or trending). Well, maybe quite a bit farther.

But try to think of it not as a deviation from norms, but as a partial definition of  norms.

Not a good thing, truly. But not a totally outsider thing, either.