In the face of hate

      A few days ago, a madman blew up the Norwegian Parliament. Then he hitched a ride to an island and shot almost ninety Norwegian children with bullets designed to fragment inside the body. Not too much later, or perhaps at the same time, Amy Winehouse joined the 27 club.

      The Norwegian people are better than me. If the gunman were in my custody, I would probably torture him. I wouldn't even ask him for information in exchange for mercy. But according to the police, he is a "very demanding prisoner." They are "interviewing" him, and noting that he has confessed to the actions but in no way does he consider his actions criminal. He wants his day in court so he can explain why he had to destroy nearly one hundred familes. He hates muslims, and he hates the people who might give muslims a break. So he shot people. He shot children. He shot kids as they were trying to swim away. Some were as young as ten.

     Amy Winehouse was possessed by a different sort of hate than that which drove Ander Behring Breivik. She hated herself. So she drugged herself, and perched a massive black wig on top of her head, which she tried to keep upright, which she scratched when she was particularly strung out. That beehive seemed to be a sort of security blanket. She plastered herself with tattoos, grew thin as a rail, lost teeth. During all of this, she didn't write fifteen hundred page manifestos of racist hatred. She wrote bleak and beautiful music. She sang like an angel that had been unfairly, or perhaps fairly, cast down. That music won five Grammys. Perhaps there were a few - maybe more than a few - young girls out there who hated themselves as well, who used her music to hold the darkness at bay. That girl can't be so sad, they might have thought. Listen to her sing. No one who sounds like that could that sad. And so Amy helped people. She hated herself, poisoned herself, and yet she did beautiful things.

    One more story here. It's my own.

    In 1989 I was a punk-ass freshman at McGill University. At the gym, I'd met a medical student who liked the way I filled out my Adidas short-shorts. One weekend close to the Christmas break I took her out to a movie. It was December 6th.

    After the movie we walked to her apartment in the student ghetto, looked at her photo album, and finally got down to the business of fooling around. Half an hour later, the phone rang. She answered it, talked for perhaps a minute, said goodbye and hung up. She had a most peculiar expression on her face.

    "What's the matter?" I said.

    "That was a friend of mine. She's clerking in the Emergency room. She called to tell me that they're bringing in all these girls. She says they've been shot to pieces."

     When I got back to residence, I found out that an armed man named Marc Lepine had walked into a lecture hall in L'Ecole Polytechnique, the engineering faculty for the University of Montreal, and told all the men to leave. Then he opened fire on the remaining women. He killed fourteen people. He hated feminists and he didn't think women deserved to be in Engineering.

     No one kills out of love. But killers love their reasons. They love their hate. They hold on to it and shut out the world until they realize the world disagrees. Then they set out to make the world hate just as much as they do. Anders Behring Breivik did it; Marc Lepine did it; Osama Bin Laden did it.

   Let's try something: Let's forget his name. Whenever someone does this, let's erase his (it's always a man, sorry) name, and only remember the names of the victims. These killers have done this to expose their cause, to be forever remembered by all the coming copycats who think greatness can be found in a gun amidst a crowd of unarmed people, and to change the world to their liking. Norway, in all its collective and calm Northern European logic, has already pledged more openness. It knows the right things because it has always done the right thing.

    Let us forever be like Norway, which through its tears has refused to change its essential goodness. Let's be like Amy, who made beautiful music in the face of her inevitable death. Let us keep making beautful things, and pledge that we will never change that which has gotten us here. No matter what looks back at us.
   
   Whatever hurts you, or frightens you, is trying to change you. Defy it, don't be fooled, and refuse. Just say no and keep creating.