Courage has no gender

I was an English Lit undergrad at McGill 24 years ago, on December 6, 1989, still living at my parents' home and busily working on an essay in the basement when news broke of what would come to be known as the Montreal Massacre.

I can still remember my mother calling me upstairs to watch the news, and experiencing, perhaps for the first time, the kind of “this-must-be-a-movie” dissociation I would later feel when first watching the carnage of 9/11.

Then it sank in.

I started thinking of the girls in my Canadian Lit class I was actively thinking of maybe pursuing, and wondering what it would feel like to hear of such a terrible crime in our classroom.

I also started thinking of girls I knew in high school with whom I lost touch, former friends and acquaintances who may well have gone on to study engineering at Ecole Polytechnique.

That's the thing about living in the same city as a large-scale tragedy: you are always potentially close to a deathly ripple.

I began thinking of this at the Brockville Rowing Club Thursday night, when the names of the 14 young women were again read out.

They still resonate for me, but there are now contemporary resonances, too, remembrances that cross national borders.

After we remember the horror of December 6 and reflect on its meaning, we will remember another horror, a terrible first anniversary we will mark December 14.

In the wake of the Polytechnique massacre, commenters on the right started a different anti-feminist backlash, suggesting the “feminization” of the North American male is what prevented the male students in those hallways from mounting an counterattack on Marc Lepine and disarming them.

That kind of thinking can still be heard today.

And then there's the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, a year ago December 14, when another crazed gunman killed 20 children and six educators with a semi-automatic rifle.

Newtown is a great many things, most of them terrible. It is not a hate crime against women specifically, but in one important way it's an answer to the whole feminization argument.

Because here were women staffers, making sure they could keep as many kids as possible safe, and putting themselves in harm's way: in some cases with fatal consequences.

The answer is that courage has no gender. And it holds just as true in Montreal, or Brockville for that matter, as it does in Connecticut.

Courage is also the sine qua non of hope and progress – which also, incidentally, have no gender.

If only we didn't need atrocities, generation after generation, to remind ourselves of these things.