They had to talk about it. I had to talk about it too. Between the beginning and the end of my course, Wednesday noon, we would confirm in the media that there had been two dead children at the daycare center in Sainte-Rose, and that everything led to believe in an intentional gesture. But as soon as I set foot in Cégep, I already knew that we had to have a discussion on this. The urgency of reflection is an instinct that must always be heeded, and dismissing it with two words, “mental illness”, does not satisfy anyone.
It was on everyone’s lips and in every corridor of the mind, in every face and every heart suddenly thrown into the open air. Laval was no longer the same Wednesday when I left the Montmorency metro station, on my way to work to give my little philosophy 101 lessons.
We discussed, in our ignorance of all the facts, whether it could be a deliberate gesture. We compared the relative value of a 2-year life versus an 80-year life. Is there a difference? We wanted to say yes, but we realized that it wasn’t working, in the afternoon group, thanks to this CEGEP student who underlined the intrinsic dignity of human life and the immeasurable suffering caused by death. We discussed the punishment, the possibility of rehabilitation and civil liability, when this other student recounted a crime she had witnessed.
I spoke with emotion of my own 2-year-old son, since I was the only one in the room who had a child, him whom I found in the evening with a tear in his eye, like all parents in Canada without doubt.
Then a student echoed this famous sentence, pronounced by his mother precisely the day before, namely that there is no greater pain for a parent.
I, who is returning to teaching these days after a long break, and who sometimes wonders about the relevance of Plato’s cave for a 17-year-old, I said to myself: here it is. Without the philosophy course, some would have had nothing left but the corridor and the rumor mill to deal with the urgency of reflection that they felt just as much as I did.
This image always came back to me, the bottom of the bus coming out of the gutted building. Everything that came after mattered little to me, the barbarian man mastered by valiant fathers, it is important, of course, but I always asked myself this question, the one that came from my guts which still tremble the next day: why affects us so much? I thought of this sentence in the movie Polytechnic by Denis Villeneuve, pronounced by Karine Vanasse, “I feel bad for all the women in the world”. I feel bad for all the parents in the world.
I showed this film for a long time in class. It was too heavy so I stopped, but by chance I mentioned it on Tuesday in another group, and five people raised their hands to admit that they did not know what had happened on the 6th. December 1989. I will start showing it again when I return from the break, certainly more deserved than usual this year in Laval.
I wonder if what happened on Wednesday is of the same order as Polytechnique. Does it deserve clear policies, like those of gun control that followed the 1989 massacre?
Does it require a philosophical reorientation of society, as in 1989 it required a constant bringing forward of feminist questions? Does it require a great public debate on the notion of Islamophobia, like that called for by the massacre at the great mosque of Quebec? Let’s recall last week’s coarse debate of the hour: it’s a notion that some have had the enormous nerve, just a few years later, to question the very idea.
I was in class on Wednesday night and I found myself telling my students that what we feel right now, this feeling of the impossible come true, is what we felt during the first school killings, when they weren’t even born. Today, that feeling has evaporated. At Cégep Montmorency itself, we experienced confinement linked to a shooting in the fall. I didn’t teach, but CEGEP students talk about it almost with detachment this winter. “I was stuck in my class for six hours”, “me too”. While this seems to me to be a huge trauma, which everyone must be encouraged to discuss constantly, because it seems to me to question the essence of what school is: the safe space par excellence, in the first sense of the term. A place where we are safe thanks to knowledge and dialogue, which replace the police in this place.
I’ll give them their first exam in two weeks, and those who read the newspaper will get the question in advance. If Polytechnique is a mass feminicide, and the killing of the Grand Mosque a multiple anti-Muslim murder, what happened on Wednesday conceptually to make it of the same order, and therefore so upsetting? Because it is. I won’t pretend to have the answer, and I can’t wait to read them.