It was Tim’s post that did it.
Tim Croston is the head of the local ATV club and one the most community minded people you’ll ever meet.
He’s also as true blue a conservative as you’ll find, too. So it brought me to tears—as so much has the last week—when he posted: “Much respect tonight for ALL the political parties in BC and Ottawa, for putting their differences aside and coming together to show support for our grieving community. I spoke with the Prime Minister even and I have to admit, he was noticeably genuinely concerned and grieving for our community. It did not go unnoticed.”
We are a community wounded. Broken. Grieving for our lost loved ones.
For some, the grief and shock is immediate and raw. I think of the parents and siblings who have to deal with empty beds and empty homes.
The family unit—in whatever form it takes—is the most basic social unit in society. It is at our parent’s feet that we are expected to learn how to function in our society. We learn core values and beliefs and how to behave, not just within that unit, but outside it as well.
And family? Is the primary source of support. It takes years for a person to mature into someone that can take care of themselves, and maybe start a new family unit. Strong families build strong communities and a stable society.
The family is the foundational unit of society, but it doesn’t end there. Put dozens, maybe hundreds of families in close proximity and you start to build communities.
If a community gets big enough, it will join together with other communities to form towns and cities.
And those towns and cities? They group together to form regional districts. Provinces. Countries.
And while I don’t know if Mark Carney or even David Eby knew the name “Tumbler Ridge” before, I know that he’d never heard of Jennifer and Emmett Jacobs, Shannda Aviugana-Durand, Kylie Smith, Zoey Benoit, Ticaria Lampert, Ezekiel Schofield or Abel Mwansa before.
Indeed, it’s a very few people—even amongst those of us who live here—who knew every one of those names. Because inside those communities, we form other relationships: friends, romantic interests, business partners, classmates.
As humans, we are always forming connections. Between people, there are connections. Between families, there are connections. And between communities, we form bonds that we can’t see, but are no less strong.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but community is important to me. I write about it a lot. About how we should treat each other with kindness and respect, even if we disagree with each other.
But community is more than just living within the same five square kilometres. Community is about those connections we make. While I live here, I am also part of a group of friends who used to place Dungeons & Dragons together. They form a community with me. I am also on a couple forums where we discuss photography. That, too, is a form of community.
There’s a saying that none of us is more than six degrees of separation from anyone else living on this globe. In Tumbler Ridge, that’s more like two. If I didn’t know one of the people who was shot directly, I know someone who does.
I know that girl who was weeping at the vigil because her best friend was shot. I know the parents of some of the victims. And yes, I knew Maya and Ezekiel and Abel. Not well, but I knew them. They were part of this community.
And now they aren’t.
We all have family elsewhere, friends. People who called to find out about if we or ours were affected by this. And maybe we weren’t directly, but we have friends—I have friends—that were, and because of that, my heart is broken, for them, and for the community at large.
Community is important. I don’t do it well. I’m introverted and awkward and show about as much emotion as a well-trained rock most of the time. (Though not now; now I start bawling at nearly everything.) But it is important to me. This is a community newspaper. The first word is as or more important than the last.
I’ve seen a lot of people who are cynically writing off the fact that the Prime Minister of Canada came to Tumbler Ridge, joined by the leaders of all Canada’s political parties.
People are saying that they’re just trying to win political brownie points. And that might be true, to some extent, but the Prime Minister? Ask Tim. He’s a person, too. Pierre Poilievre? Despite jokes I may or may not have made about him in the past, is also part of that shared humanity.
And what they’re doing is not (just) political theatre. Yes, they stood around and talked seriously betwixed themselves for the camera, but they also talked to the people here. And they listened.
There’s that old saying that crap rolls downhill. But responsibility? Rises. And these are people who are responsible for the well-being of the people of the country, and they feel this. Maybe not the same way, but just as deeply and profoundly as we do here in town.
We all know someone who knows someone who was directly impacted by this, even the federal leaders. And as I was transcribing their speeches, I found myself again weeping at the kindness and love and sympathy that they shared, and at the memory of the tragedy.
Because Canada? Is just community writ large. And while we might not all agree on politics, we can all agree that now is not the time for politics. For divisiveness. For pulling apart.
Now? Now is a time to be together. A time to remember those we have lost. A time to mourn. A time to celebrate the ones we lost and support and uplift and love one another.
And while we might think we have exclusive rights to this pain, we don’t, and we need to allow space for others across Canada to join us in our grief.
Soon we will start to rebuild. To recover. To get back to our daily lives.
But not today.
Today it’s still okay to cry.
Vigils covered by winter. As the paper was going to press, snow had fallen on the tribute at town hall, where the flags still fly at half mast.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
