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November 22, 2012
Anguish of Christmas
Scattered throughout this issue of the Cosmos, you will find a number of stories about one of the most cherished of Christmas traditions - the family feast. On Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, thousands of Canadians will make the annual pilgrimage to be with their loved ones, even for just a few hours, to reconnect with their roots, to laugh and sing and talk. As most of our contributors report, it’s not the food (however sumptuous it may be) that matters, it’s the people around the table.
Part of the Christmas dinner tradition for many of our writers’ families is a toast, or even a moment of silence, for those who were at the table last year or the year before, but are no longer here. In one case, the family even sets an empty chair at one end of the table, as a continual reminder throughout the feast that comfort and joy can be fleeting, and should be desperately held on to.
It will be difficult this Christmas, particularly for those who have young children in their midst, not to give a thought to, or perhaps say a prayer for, 26 heart-broken families in a small town in Connecticut who will have just such an empty chair around their Christmas table. Indeed, it’s difficult to fathom the courage that would be required for those families to even go ahead with the rituals of Christmas; every moment will remind them of who they have lost. Who, after all, enjoys the brightness of this season more than a six-year-old child?
In the moments after we first learned of the tragedy last week, we in Uxbridge may have felt somewhat of a connection to the victims, simply because we have a small community called Sandy Hook in our own town. And all of us felt an ache as we moved through our own lives, watched our own children walk home from school as those 20 children never will again. It really is incomprehensible.
In the ensuing days, U.S. President Barack Obama said all the right things, and there’s no doubting his sincerity. But we want to believe him as well when he said it’s time to take “meaningful action” so that such tragedies become far less likely to occur, rather than becoming commonplace.
Certainly gun control is a central cog in any action plan, but the American culture of violence goes far, far deeper than that. And we in Canada shouldn’t be feeling all smug that what happened in Newton could never happen here. It has happened here, often. Most horrifically in Montreal in 1989, but most recently on Danzig Avenue last summer, where it’s only a matter of blind luck that only two died at a block party gone horribly wrong because of the availability of guns.
The invisible line that divides the USA from Canada is no barrier at all to the infection of our young people by whatever has infected the youth of America. So if, as we all must hope, the policymakers south of the border get together in a bi-partisan way to wrestle with the issues that created Adam Lanza, we in Canada should be paying very close attention, and probably holding parallel discussions of our own.
Because we are only fooling ourselves if we think our own children are invulnerable to the kind of insanity that was unleashed in Connecticut last Friday.
July 14, 2011
