| I Will Not Speak of Vampire Culture
In response to the Dawson College shootings of 13 September 2006 in Montreal, one block west of the author’s apartment.
I will not speak of vampire culture, or the clothes that the man wore, or the shooting games that he played on his computer. I am not interested in his hate mask. In another time, the man’s hate might have dressed itself in the outlaw’s black hat and steely stare. No doubt, he would have been a fast hand with a six-shooter. Clearly, Kimveer Gill was a hate cliché. Of interest here is not the cliché but the hate that it enfolds. Why is there hate where love is also possible? In his website postings, Gill raged against the world, seeing nothing good in it. We have all experienced such moments of profound despair but not because we hate the world and the people in it. No, we despair because we love the world so much, knowing that too often we fall short of its grandeur. So there are times when going about the dailiness of life, we taste the bitterness of hate. We hate the rush-hour drivers, the subway-platform idlers, and the guy serving coffee who can’t keep an order straight. We hate that our planet is dying, that every day there is death in war, that a young woman named Anastasia De Sousa was shot to death at school. We hate because we love the world so much. And for the same reason, we sometimes hate ourselves – not always, maybe not even often. But the hate that we feel for others is always matched by an inward-turning hate. Like the other drivers, the other idlers, the other coffee patrons, we, too, make up the sea that we sometimes despise. The gun that Gill turned on others, he also turned on himself. So why did the man in the hate mask give up on love, both for himself and for others? Like a plant that by nature inclines toward light, Gill must have inclined toward love. He must have yearned, like any of us, for the communion with others that is our highest experience of self, the communion found in sex and friendship and community that feeds our selfhood and all growth. He must have known enough of love to have grown to hate its absence. No, Gill did not always hate the world, or the people in it, or himself. Love, not hate, is our natural disposition. But so completely had he turned toward hate that he had begun the slow death of the plant that has longed for light but found none. Ultimately, to give up on love was his choice. Most of us choose to seek out love tenaciously, to never give in to its absence, to never let the bastards grind us down. Gill did not. But hate is a death sentence and a paradox. Thwarted in his love for life, the hater recoils into a rejection of life. That which he wanted to love, he destroys instead, including himself. It is a mistake, then, to take the hate mask for the hater’s face. We must not call the hater evil and leave it at that. His actions were clearly evil, but his soul was not. Rather, hate begets hate, just as love nurtures love. Indeed, in every moment of every day, in every action that we take toward one another both as individuals and as nations, in every desire and every prayer directed at others, there is always a choice to love or to hate. And more, this choice has consequences – for ourselves, for others, for the victims of today’s wars, and for tomorrow’s Kimveer Gills and Anastasia De Sousas. 20 September 2006
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