Making Sense Out Of Senseless Brutality

This has not been a good Friday for me and certainly it has shaped into a rather bad Good Friday.  My right knee is sore and stiff and bandaged and likely sprained, and the young native person who tripped me so that I fell on my face on the sidewalk is in police custody.  I have told one of the officers that I am not going to lay charges as this is something I do not want on my conscience.  My knee is stiff and inflamed, probably sprained and I will be facing some walking difficulties for a while anyway.  Last night a comment I put on the CBC website about the late Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an author whose writing has never thrilled me, simply an innocent statement that his writing has bored me in two languages, gained me at least three incredibly abusive replies.  One was rather mild, and it was suggested that I might prefer reading the Toronto Sun or Tom Clancy instead.  I responded, naming two Latin American authors I enjoy in Spanish (Isabel Allende and Colombian author Laura Restrepo) and another Nobel winner, other than el don Marquez, Doris Lessing.  This gave rise to two especially vituperative comments and I am still recovering.  One said that both my Spanish and English are equally lousy and that no one cares what my reading preferences are and that I should get psychiatric help.  The other was even worse.  I was told that my mother should have aborted me since I make this person and alleged others want to throw up.
     Both the last comments were posted in Spanish without English translation and I am assuming the two cowards who posted them were hoping that along with the anonymity of posting online they could also hope that the CBC moderator didn't read Spanish.  I went back online and translated the comments for the benefit of the moderator and others who don't read Spanish, satisfied that those abusive cowards needn't feel too protected in their anonymity.
     I was extremely upset by this, and I would say, traumatized and felt upset, depressed, disoriented, and had difficulty sleeping.  Today I still feel bad.  I attended the noon Good Friday service in my Anglican parish church where I was one of the readers (four lines, big deal!).  I really wanted to stay home.  I am glad now that I went, if for no other reason than to pay homage to one who suffered incredibly more than I did and for much greater cause and purpose, but also because of the seamless beauty in this service heightened by a very moving sermon from our rector.
     Following a walk in Stanley Park I picked up a small bag of groceries and stopped at a favourite café on Davie Street for an ice Americano and to spend some time drawing.  I still didn't feel well as I walked the rest of the way home and had more than average second hand smoke to avoid on the sidewalk.  As I turned onto Granville Street from Davie I stopped to let one smoker gain a safe distance between us.  Then, three young aboriginals, a man and two women were walking more slowly ahead of me, smoking and I did not want to end up choking on their smoke.  I tried to trot past them.  One of the women would not let me pass, so I said excuse me as I tried to squeeze between her and the male who stuck out his foot and tripped me.  I fell flat on my face and since I was already upset about the online bullying I started weeping and I shouted out "You asshole!  You deliberately tripped me."  I was suddenly surrounded by all these kind compassionate people asking me if I was alright and helping me up and others shouting to the coward ahead of me "Hey asshole, come back and apologize."  They of course neither turned around or slowed down.  They walked into the liquor store (but where else would they go?) next door to the entrance to my building.  I saw enough of them to be able to assemble a credible description to police.  When I got home, after crying for a while, I looked at my knee which was skinned and bleeding and sore.  Seeing it wasn't too serious I called 911, still crying, gave the police a description.  They called me back a minute later and asked me to come down.  When I got there they had the guy who tripped me in handcuffs.
      This for me felt very awkward.  I felt compassion for him even as they cuffed him, even as he verbally denied doing anything, even as they shuffled him into the squad car.  I went back up to my apartment to continue dressing my wounded knee.  The phone rang again and the same officer, a young lady, asked me to please come down to make a statement.  When I got to the lobby a young male police officer was standing there.  We talked together about what happened.  He asked me if I was going to lay charges.  I said no, I do not want that on my conscience.  So the young aboriginal, who likely hates white people, gets a warning and is told not to go around tripping little old men and is allowed to go free.  But I know what jail and prison do to people and I would rather trust God to do the work of change and correction and reform in this man's life.
     I then went to the office to tell our assistant manager about what happened.  She was very kind and gave me a chocolate caramel filled Easter egg and told me to check in with her tomorrow morning.
     The support I have received in the face of this nastiness has been incredible and when I find myself despairing of humanity I am going to try to remember that for that one idiot who tripped me there are at least ten more good people who will help you if you are in trouble or danger.
     Back to the cyber bullying.  This is something very small compared to what drove teenage girls Amanda Todd and Retrea Parsons to suicide.  Yet even those three small attacks were traumatizing to me and I'm a hardened mature man with experience coping with abuse unlike those two vulnerable little girls who were so relentlessly attacked and overwhelmed that they took their own lives.  I tried to unsubscribe to CBC online last night because of this, then tried to delete every one of their emails from my file, only to realise that this is unhealthy and really what I needed to do was face it.  This morning I renewed my subscription then had another look at the abusive comments and my replies to them.  I felt proud of myself for responding with dignity, and respect for my attackers as well as for myself because rather than retaliate I explained why this kind of commenting is not appropriate and translated their abusive remarks into English as a way of exposing them.
     This is also causing me to look at just what was said in the attacks.  First, about this one Spanish speaker's desire that my mother had aborted me.  Yes, a particularly nasty and ugly thing to tell someone, but why was this so effective for upsetting me?  My mother had a couple of abortions, one before I was born and one when I was sixteen years old.  I was very saddened about these abortions because I felt absolutely deprived of two brothers (both fetuses were male) but I also respected her choice and how difficult if not impossible it would have been for her to provide these children with a good home and that she just did not feel she could go on with the pregnancies. 
     I am also reminded of once, when I was thirty-two years old and supporting my mother through the early stages of her cancer diagnosis and she phoned me after eleven one night simply to explain to me at length why she was pro-choice.  I was not clearly pro-choice at that time in my life, though I still respected a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy if this was something she couldn't or didn't want to go through.  But I still thought abortion to be a great tragedy, and even though I now call myself pro-choice, I still think it's a huge tragedy. 
     I felt very upset by my mother's phone call.  It was as though she was trying to invoke a very dark, ancient and primeval power in our relationship: her power to deny me existence, if retroactively.  It was for me a chilling experience and it did for a while cast a shadow, that really had always existed, on our relationship.
     I actually began to see myself as pro choice around the time I was already gathering a sense of acceptance of same sex marriage.  I had befriended a radical Christian community of strident pro life activists in my church in 1997, when I was forty-one and my mother had been dead more than six years.  I already had a clear sense that had my mother not chosen to terminate that first pregnancy of hers, she would not likely have met or married my father and I would not exist.  This helped me see abortion and choice in context and I soon found myself in sharp opposition to my friends in this radical Christian community.  As I said already, I still find abortion to be a huge tragedy, and if I were a woman finding herself unfortunately pregnant, or a doctor being called upon to do the deed for her, I really don't know what my response would be.  But life is full of hard and difficult choices and trade offs as well as pyrrhic victories and there are some situations where there are no winners, only reduced harm and damage control and still there are casualties.  I think we'll always have casualties.
     In a deeply shadowed part of my soul I still mourn for my two brothers whom I hope to meet in heaven while thanking my mother for making that difficult choice, giving me life, and wanting and loving me while raising me the best she could.  To that unfortunate individual who made that cruel comment to me I feel clear of resentment now and pray for peace, love and reconciliation for this one and that whatever would impel him or her and others and myself as well towards such cruel behaviour would be expelled and redeemed and healed.
     To the person who thinks I need a psychiatrist for my inferiority complex all I can say is I saw a psychiatrist who mentored me towards recovery and no, I do not have an inferiority complex and I hope that one day, free from the cruel anonymity of the Internet, that you and I might meet again as friends.