A sad anniversary today.

Perhaps it's a bit more personally resonant to me now than it was before, given the events at Dawson last September. During the whole thing the Polytechnique massacre of December 1989 was very much on my mind. One major difference was that at Dawson a massacre was averted by timely police action. Another major differance, though, was that in the Polytechnique massacre the gunman was targeting young women who were getting into the traditionally male dominated field of engineering.

I was in high school when it happened, and I thought of my female classmates who I really respected and who seemed to be destined to the sciences, and it really showed me that the attainment of equality between the sexes was not a neat historical process, but a dangerous struggle for those engaged in it- dangerous because those feeling threatened by that struggle could strike back with violence. I already
sort of knew that from my reading of history, but this was not the reading of history, it was the real thing, and it was messy and dangerous- and deadly. Though not to me. Ever noticed how the threat of violence means different things to men
and women? Even now, the threats are differant in a way that can curtail women's freedoms.

People can argue that this is attaching too much social and political significance to the massacre. The gunman was crazy, they may say. But what is that saying? You could argue that Hitler was crazy, but you wouldn't then say that his murder of the Jews was just the expression of a form of personal insanity that had nothing to with the anti-Semitism that the Jews had had to endure for centuries. Sometimes we say that someone's actions are insane when we don't want to acknowledge the pervasive context of which they are an extreme example.

December 6, 1989 also affected my father, who taught physics in CEGEP. He dedicated all subsequent publications of his textbook to those killed in the massacre.