I have spent this last week vacillating between nausea,
heartbreak,outrage and mute apoplexy, and still can't really articulate
how I feel regarding the issue upon which I am about to expound... I've
cried, I've raged. I've prayed...But most of all, I've had to explain to
people-far too many people, people who claim to be enlightened and
"woke"-what's caused me such emotional upheaval in the
first place!!
This Spring, much of the "Knowne Worlde" has been
commemorating the centennial of the Tampa/Greenwood Massacre. It's about
bloody time. It is at once horrifying and baffling that something so
egregious could have occurred so close to home, and so recent to our
lifetime, yet remain virtually-if not deliberately-unknown. It's
acknowledgement might have continued to remain denied if not for it's
shocking depiction last year in "The Watchmen" an
action/adventure/fantasy series on HBO.
But yet...
This VERY weekend, a discovery was unearthed in our own backyard that I was sure would plunge our Nation into riotous grief: demonstrations, chanting, singing, drumming, signs and banners reading RED LIVES MATTER! RED DEATHS MATTER!! SUFFER THE CHILDREN!! NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE!! and equally catchy slogans bouncing rhythmically over the heads of the thousands of traumatised Canadians parading through the streets of every major city of our enlightened, liberal, egalitarian nation...
Instead, there have been a few polite and understated vigils involving candles and children's shoes collect in symbolic piles on the steps of government buildings, where flags have been lowered to half mast. I've had to waste valuable mourning time telling anyone who will listen that the bodies of-at last count-215 children were found in a mass grave on the property of what was known as, until the mid 70's, Kamloops Residential School.
I will repeat.
The bodies of 215 children were discovered in a mass grave in Kamloops British Columbia.
THE BODIES OF TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN CHILDREN WERE DISCOVERED IN A MASS GRAVE IN KAMLOOPS, BRITISH COLUMBIA!!!
Yes. It's true. It really happened. This nightmarish obscenity of Holocaustian proportion occurred just a few hours drive outside of Vancouver, in our lifetime. This isn't some textbook historical event, rendered clinical and abstract by distance and time;Cambodian Killing Fields or Spanish Inquisition. This is here and now. It's real. It's Us.
Where is the outrage? Why aren't we tearing at our hair and rending our garments?! I would like to think the deafening silence is the result of shock, disbelief, and denial. I can't even condemn people for not caring. Ultimately, they just don't know anything about it...
To be continued...unfortunately!
