The only part of Canada I have visited is Nova Scotia. It was an uplifting experience which enabled me to write at first hand about a great music festival, Celtic Colours, held at the very time of year when the colours are quite sensational. From Nova Scotia last night came news of a shocking, tragic event. A worthless and presumably deranged individual identified as Gabriel Wortman, 51, had dressed himself as a policeman and shot dead 'at least 16 people' in a grotesque act of mass murder following which he, too, was killed.
I re-open the Covid-19 Diaries series to allow Bill Taylor to reflect, briefly from Toronto, on the 'evil and insanity' that may have combined in a bleak drama that started in the village of Portapique but spread ...
Stunned notes from the trenches:
It takes unspeakable tragedy to push unspeakable tragedy down the headlines.
We’re left, in the midst of our pandemic plight, to try to grasp the horror of the mass shootings in Nova Scotia; to contemplate the amorphous nature of evil and insanity; to quantify a different kind of senseless death.
Life will go on – behind closed doors, behind masks, behind the barriers, real and virtual, that we are compelled to erect. Any reaching out for solace will be at a distance. There will be no understanding.
Tomorrow is another day and our own tenuous situation will reassert itself. Life, stumbling and bewildered, fearful and strange, will go on.
But, for today at least, the rest is silence.
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