What a weekend.
Last Friday, the leader of the “free world” (that moniker is sounding ever-more surreal) decreed that thousands of innocent, law-abiding citizens were to be detained or deported at American airports because of their country of origin — all predominantly Muslim.
Sunday, a man walks into a mosque in Quebec City, opens fire murdering six people, leaving others clinging to life.
It’s understandable if our Muslim friends are feeling on edge. They’re not alone.
Just yesterday, I got an email from a woman reporting a swastika in Steveston. Graffiti hardly compares to a shooting death, but as she said, “I’m Jewish, it feels like too much, too close to home.” And with everything else that’s going on...
That’s the sinister nature of terror; it seeps into our psyches and colours everything.
The day after the 9/11 attacks, my neighbour’s four-year-old son went missing. It turned out he had decided to go visit his older brother at school so headed out on his tricycle. Two women on their power walk spotted him and called 911. When my neighbour went to pick him up at the community police station, an officer asked her what language her son spoke because he wasn’t responding to queries. She said he wasn’t talking yet, because, as she later told me, she was too afraid to “admit” Arabic.
New York is a long way from Richmond, but the repercussions were being felt.
But we have a choice. We can focus on terror or we can focus on the vigils held across the country, including here in Richmond, where 170 people from all faiths came to stand in unity with the Muslim community.
We can talk about travel bans or we can talk about The Southsiders — loud, proud Whitecaps fans who follow the team to games in Seattle and Portland — that has cancelled all road trips to the U.S. until the ban is lifted. They refuse to leave anyone behind.
Even in the case of my neighbour, the story we need to hear is that when two women saw a little boy frozen with fear smack in the middle of Railway Avenue, they went out to get him. When he refused to budge, they stood on the road with him and waved cars to go around until police arrived.
We can’t deny an anti-Muslim/immigrant attitude is out there among some, but when it comes to terrorist attacks, we need to remember all recent ones in Canada have been perpetrated by disturbed individuals with mental health and addiction issues. These are hardly the glorious martyrs they would have us believe, and their actions don’t deserve the pervasive fear and distrust they’re meant to spread when so many more among us do the right thing.
