Happy Face 19

Isn't it interesting, Gentle Reader, what people can do to betray themselves, at times? We are always caught off-guard, and the most lovely, progressive liberal folk, in the moment of a very natural expression of emotion, be it grief, joy or outrage, will so quickly and unashamedly show their true cloth. Solomon knew this, about the visceral, unscripted expressions of emotion, and what they say about us. When two women were disputing their maternal rights to a baby, we might recall how he called one of his soldiers to use his sword to cut the infant in half, giving half to one mother, and half to the other. Of course, the child's natural mother went into hysterics, clung to her child, and begged that his life be spared. The other woman was rather detached about it all. Solomon awarded custody to the child's true and natural mother. Times of grief and outrage also reveal much about us. What I have been finding particularly telling these days is the huge paean of public grief and sorrow over the untimely death of sixteen teenage hockey players last year, or, the Humboldt Broncos, in Saskatchewan, when their bus was collided into by a truck. The grief and outrage were instantaneous and, of course with help from our public propaganda machine, the CBC, soon there seemed not a dry eye anywhere in this great land of ours, from St. John's all the way to Tofino. Even now, many months later, regular white bread Timbits eating and Double-Double sipping real white middle class heterocentric Canadians are still sharing their grief. So, what does this have to do with my blog, we might ask? Well, first of all, I have been very dry-eyed around this bus crash, and not because I'm a callous sociopath who takes schadenfreud in the sufferings of others. Far be it from this blogger. On the other hand, I have often found myself getting annoyed, even strongly and viscerally angry over all this public and near nationalist necrophilia about sixteen dead teenage hockey players. Yes, I know, they were kids, snuffed out before they could do anything with their lives. And that is always tragic. They were also white kids. Males. Jocks. And above all else, they were all HOCKEY PLAYERS!!!!! Likely all heterosexual (though, really, who can tell?). And suddenly there was this outpouring of collective grief, encouraged by the CBC and social media. I got even angrier. Why, you might ask? Well, how about the eight queer men, most of them brown, who were savagely murdered and dismembered in Toronto by Bruce McArthur? Or the mostly aboriginal sex workers ground up in the meat processing machines on Picton's pig farm? True, they and the Highway of Tears, have been given a lot of media coverage. But then after reading or hearing about it, everyone seems to turn amnesic. Where are the collective Canadian tears for those people? Why are we so selective in our affection and kindred sense? How many straight white Timbit eaters are really going to care a crap about some brown guy, likely ostracised by his own tradionalist and conservative family members and ethnic community, for loving and sleeping with other men? Yes, we have legalized same sex marriage in this country and queer people are protected under all our human rights legislations. But when it comes to actual feeling, actual fellow feeling, most of us still have a long way to go. You cannot make people change, perhaps, but if writing these words can at least shame the crap out of some of those closet bigots, then I will feel that I have done my job. Smile. And don't forget to laugh!