20 Years

December 6th, 1989 was a distressingly memorable day for me.

I was writing one of the first, or maybe it was even THE first, exam of my Engineering education at Guelph. Guelph was a small-ish engineering faculty, around 300 students total at that time, with less than 100 in my first year. Proportionately, however, we had a dubious claim to fame. 23% of the students in my year were women - a record proportion for any first year engineering class in the country.

Revved up on caffeine and nerves from our very first end-of-term finals, I recall that we walked out of the gymnasium where we sat our exam, to find most of our faculty and many senior and graduate students waiting to meet us - seemed oddly personal to be greeted by faculty at the end of the exam. Then we noticed the looks on the faces as they sort of rounded us up and told us the news about what had just happened at École Polytechnique in Montreal. I don't recall any particular reactions from anyone. We were all just sort of stunned, staring. I think there may have been offers to walk us back to our residences or the Engineering lounge together, wherever we needed to go, and information on how to get in touch with counselling services. I don't know if anyone ever used that.

As the next few days went by, white ribbons appeared on sleeves, vigils, memorials, and lots of quiet, personal talks and no doubt some tears happened. The news sunk in, some people realized they knew some of the women killed, or knew-someone-who-knew-someone, things like that. The Engineering student community is not huge, and there are provincial and national student engineering societies that networked among the schools. We for the most part got on with finishing our semester and exams and most were probably relieved to go home.

I remember being sad, the way I am to hear of anyone dying in horrid violence, and stressed and tired, but not particularly feeling a great deal of trauma or grief myself. But something about that day did thread through the rest of my education and my life since. Something very disturbing struck me that day - it was the first time in my life that it really sunk in that someone could really think women had no business - that I had no business - doing what we wished to do and being what we wished to be, merely because we were women. I had understood prejudice, sexism, racism, any-other-ism existed, intellectually, but that day it really hit me that there were people out there who somehow had their socialization so screwed up that they thought it right to hate and act out against other people just for being what they were.

December 6th has become a memorial, Canada-wide, not just to the 14 lost at École Polytechnique, but to all women hurt and killed in gender-motivated violence. Sadly, while the media spectacle of mass murder is rare, we don't seem to have made much progress. Just searching the days news can show examples of how behind we still are in ensuring gender equity in employment, social services, parenting, and just plain physical security of person. While I'm one of the empowered and have the ability to assure my own security in many ways, I am still very saddened by seeing examples all around me of the same continuum, of which the events of December 6th, 1989 were an extreme example.

It's sad. I remain at a loss for what to do, most of the time. I guess all I can say about it is always remember, speak up when you see not just violence but injustice and inequity, examine what you do and say, and help ensure that "Never Again" really is true.