“Being rational people, we recoil from this. We look for “root causes.” We imagine power-sharing arrangements. We entertain the conceit that “peace talks” should do the trick, as if the demands of Incel or Hezbollah or Hamas can be negotiated rationally at some kind of bargaining table. Give and take. Compromise. Jaw-jaw, better than war-war. That sort of thing.
There is certainly enough madness to go around.
Lucky for us, there is also usually enough kindness. We each have our own peculiar traditions and ideas about how to discharge the fundamental human duty of care for one another in such circumstances. My own hope is that we will not fail to ensure to comfort and console the crushed family of 25-year-old Alek Minassian, in common with all the other grieving families from Monday’s atrocity.
We are all ridiculously and perfectly irrational about all of it. We put up little shrines. We write little letters to the dead and pile them on street corners. We have moments of silence. We offer up prayers. We hold hands with perfect strangers.
We carry on.” Terry Glavin
Farzad Salehi consoles his wife, Mehrsa Marjani, who was at a nearby cafe and witnessed the aftermath when a van plowed down a crowded sidewalk, killing multiple people and injuring others, Monday, April 23, 2018, in Toronto. (Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Canadian Press via AP)
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