In her columns, our collaborator Nathalie Plaat calls on your stories. In March, she asked you to tell her how you experience the climate emergency, how you think about the future, what are your anxieties, your hopes, your uprisings. Selected extract.
Recently, I received a message from a neighbor asking me to come to the march that took place on Sunday in Quebec City, organized by the group Mères au front. I refused. She then suggested that I write a text urging the fathers in my environment to take part. I refused again. The spontaneity of my reaction disturbed me, whereas I am often so afraid of disappointing. I claim to be a feminist, I am concerned by the future of children and I respect the militancy, the combativeness of my neighbour.
You have probably heard of her: Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette. She is nothing less than one of the instigators of the movement, among many other things.
Why did my refusal impose itself so deliberately as an answer?
Because I gave up. Something just gave way. I cannot say precisely when this process of resignation began. Yet I was raised as an activist and, as the cult Niagara song so aptly puts it, “I was in every fight”. In 2000, I received the Governor General’s Medal for my humanitarian work. I am also suffering from a complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which makes my relationship with the suffering of others difficult. The violence and the horror of the world, for me, always have a weight, a smell, a color. One might think that this hypersensitivity gives me a head start in the frantic race for the survival of the world.
Quite the opposite is happening right now.
The situation drained me, exhausted. Tetanized would be the right word. At first, I was enraged at my utter helplessness. My anger slowly turned into revulsion, a kind of disgust with myself and our collective indolence, eventually becoming pure resignation.
In all honesty, I have sometimes thought of making symbolic and artistic gestures in order to maintain a certain notion of hope. In order to tell me that I have made my contribution and sleep better at night. It no longer works. I think of those hundred individuals so powerful they could change the course of things with the flick of a finger. Imagine how these people perceive us, how they perceive themselves to persist in not wanting to act? Formerly, I would have found the thing terrifying. Now I find it simply grotesque.
How to live in this context? One minute at a time, I guess. Not by relieving ourselves of responsibility, but also by remembering that there are limits to the hats that the masters of the world can make us wear. Strangely enough, it’s when I watch my children live that I’m not afraid. I do not really know why. Maybe it’s because I feel that our generation has already completed its lap. I prepare my children a little more each day for the rest of the world to (re)build. I reserve my love, my gentleness and my strength for my tribe. The collective project, what am I saying, that of civilization, has become too big for me, like my fatigue.
I salute people like Anaïs, who still have the energy and the passion to get into the fight. I admire you. And those who, like me, have given up, I admire you just as much.