The Monsters Among (within) us...

Fall is already nudging summer along here. I woke up to a rained-out Saturday with with damp, cool fall air after a week of going to work under solid blue skies
and high-temperatures. I was planning a camping excursion with some friends but of course, those plans had to be shelved. It's been a strange and shocking week as far as greater events are concerned. I'm specifically referring to the tragic and brutal stabbing and beheading incident aboard a Greyhound bus in Manitoba over a week ago. I haven't been so haunted or scared by a news story in a long time. The suddenness and random nature of it and the gruesome graphic accounts have really cast a pall of shock and disbelief both nationally and internationally. This is one of those incidents that is so senseless and so extreme that it has temporarily bypassed our jaded collective consciousness
and assaulted our comfortable sense of remove from isolated incidents of unleashed psychosis. The unnerving nature of this event reminds us of the underlying primitive, violent impulse that each of us possesses but few act upon. We, especially as Canadians, have always prided ourselves on our moderate and peaceful nature and then an episode of such unexplainable horror happens and contradicts this almost smug self-image that I think I've mentioned in previous blogs, is a rapidly becoming an outmoded delusion in the Canadian psyche. We've finally entered the big, dangerous world and in a sense, we've experienced a further fraying at the edges of our naivete. It's inevitable that an event like the beheading, has traumatized not only on the witnesses but by extension the entire populace here. There is a palpable psychic resonance from this event that has lingered in the last week. A public grief and shock that is almost the nail in the coffin to our innocence as a nation. Perhaps I've consumed too much media lately and I should disengage and find joy in the simpler moments of life but this doesn't preclude or erase the tremendous potential for evil and harm that exist in this world and more and more in the west where anti-social trends are marketed and sold to a spiritually-bankrupt demographic. We are awash in what some with a dubious grasp of reality and a literal grasp of biblical exhortation would describe as apocalyptic times, yet to convey this is to attract the suspicion of those in the intelligentsia who are skeptical of catch-all labels. It feels like there's this overhang of rage in our society right now and that it will express itself in more and more mentally-unbalanced individuals acting out in extreme ways. I think the threat of Islamic terrorism is one shade of many fanatical and angry groups or individuals. To illustrate my point, two radical groups tried to capitalize on the funeral of the victim of this Greyhound bus beheading. One was a U.S. based group of right-wing, fundamentalist lunatics who wanted to cross the border to picket the funeral insisting that the murder was God's retribution to Canada for it's liberal policies vis-a-vis gay marriage and abortion. This logic is so irrational and offensive that a hate group like this so-called "Church" are morally equivalent to the perpetrator of this dastardly crime. Another radical fringe group PETA exploited this event as an opportunity to compare the stabbing, beheading and defiling of the victim as similar to the butchering of animals for food. It's ironic how an organization like this could show such tasteless, callous inhumanity in protesting the inhumanity shown towards animals. Who are these vile and detestable groups? They have been allowed to flower in our culture of permission and tolerance. We can always compare our system to China and feel good about it, yet there's always a dividend.
But to return to the point. A horrible event like this always offers up proof that civilization is merely a varnish for our much darker and violent impulses.