Updated from a 2015 post:

28 years ago today; I was pregnant, happy, optimistic for my child, who was being born into a world that had just breached the Berlin Wall. It seemed like peace was breaking out all over. And then, Dec 6. Montreal. L’Ecole Polytechnic.

It was a terrible shock. Not just that a single shooter would attack students at a university. But that he would specifically order classes to separate into groups of male and female, and then shoot, murder, slaughter, the women only. And then repeat in other classes.

Suddenly, the entire nation, was confronted with a terrible truth: as people listened to the reports, some realized they’d momentarily expected -and accepted- the idea that the shooter might separate the victims by sex, so that he could shoot the men. That he targeted the women was a surprise, an affront.

The tragedy of L’Ecole Polytechnic gave Canadians a double shock: We realized our attitudes to violence had been blunted by patriarchal assumptions that included the horrid acceptance that males were legitimate targets for violence. Equally, our understanding of violence against women had been dismally, willfully, complicitly, naive. The value of feminism as a necessity, even as it was being described as the murderer’s motivation, was confirmed.  The optimism of Berlin was washed in the horrors, the guilty insights, of Montreal. 22 days later, I gave birth to a daughter.

Now, 28 years on, we have Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (& men), and Black Lives Matter, because people of colour are vastly more likely to be killed by the state, or have their deaths ignored by the state. We have the #MeToo campaign, and Time Magazine has declared the “Silence Breakers” to be their Person(s) of the Year, because so many women are OVER being sexually harassed or assaulted (or both). Violence Against Women has been raised to iconic, professionalized status. It is now possible to use the acronym of VAW and be widely understood while condemning patriarchy, the ubiquitous and resilient inequities between sexes, and while arguing for services, policies, legislation, and/or education to mitigate VAW. Good steps have been taken. But not enough, else all the women – myself included – who wrote #MeToo on our social media, and the Silence Breakers would not have had any silence to break. But just as bad is the fact that unlike in 1986, when it seemed like peace was breaking out all over, we have violence expanding: wars in Syria, Yemen, refugee crises in Europe, North Africa, and most recently Myanmar and Bangladesh (and not enough being said about the violence in refugee camps and the trafficking of child refugees), the violence in Mexico… it has only been a year since  Americans voted in a man who bragged about his history of sexual harassment and assault. Now they are about to send another multiply-accused pedophile to the Senate.  While the USA has banned immigrants from predominantly Muslim nations on the grounds of violence-prevention, they have themselves allowed an average of 12,843 people to be murdered with, and another 20,000 (average) to suicide with, a gun. 

Violence, is resilient.

As I wrote in 2015, in the first version of this post, acceptance of violence itself has not moved on much from the guilty horror of 1986.  Mothers’ children continue to be slaughtered. Today, as every Dec 6, I condemn the craven political decisions that permit the means for violence; I mourn for those mothers who suffer the catastrophe of violence against (or by) their child, and offer a grateful whew to the luck goddess that I am not in their cohort.

[Image credit: The European Danse Macabre, Alberto Martini, 1915, via @LibroAntiguo ]