Sixteen years since fourteen young women were extinguished because they had the gall to pursue what society owed them.
Sixteen years to remember the terror and grief, and fume that it took days before someone noticed it wasn’t just fourteen people shot, but fourteen women.
Sixteen years to work and act to end violence against women.
Sixteen years to remember fourteen names, and let them be a symbol of the thousands whose names we do not know.
I remember. It happened on my birthday. I was young, female, ambitious, and college-educated, just the kind of young woman this young man hated enough to kill.
Ditto. I was in South Carolina in 1989, and I expect the local paper there gave it about as much attention as it gave anything outside the U.S. borders that didn’t directly involve America, i.e. at most a brief squib in the “world news” section buried deep in the paper.
Sixteen years ago I was finishing my first semester of college, less than 500 miles south of Montréal, yet this is the first I’ve heard of the École Polytechnique tragedy. I’m somewhat horrified that my small, liberal arts school didn’t bring this incident to our attention.
It’s hard to believe it’s been sixteen years. And sad to think, notwithstanding the efforts of innumerable Canadian women and men, how far we still have to go. Thanks, matt.
I was just a kid when that happened, but I remember being scared that someone could hold so much hate against these people just because they were women. Thinking about it still makes me cry.
Tonight, I’m going to call all the successful, educated, ambitious women I know and tell them I’m proud of them.
My father came in from the garage where he’d been listening to am news radio and asked me, “Where is it Laura goes to school?”. There’d just been a story about women being shot to death at a college in Montreal. My best friend Laura had left Michigan to go to university in Montreal the year before. I spent the next couple of hours trying reach her or her parents w/ no success while the American news stations gave no other details. Finally I got through to her at MacGill University and found it wasn’t her school and she was fine but shook up. I won’t forget my franticness and fear for her, and I can’t imagine it’s any thing like what the families and friends of the real victims went through.
Why the interspersed statistics? It reads like the text equivalent of a martial procession played over ever more ghastly images of your dead troops, i.e. propaganda.
I could list the names of men killed in Iraq, along with the statistics* for false accusations of child and spousal abuse, would that spur parent’s rights legislation?
I remember hearing about this and it was truly horrific, amongst the starkest incidents of sheer prejudice and hatred in the decade. But I still think it cheapens it to use it for political purposes.
Huh? It’s more powerful to note that it was fourteen people, killed by prejudice and hatred. Their particulars serve to humanize them, but their gender is just a specific example of their humanity.
*Don’t have them, it being by definition an extra-legal thing.
Except that those two have nothing to do with each other. Soldiers killed in the line of duty, and child abuse? What’s your connection?
These women were killed because they were women. Violence against women has always been a problem, and still is a huge problem. Violence against women is under-reported, and often ignored. The statistics that Matt included just show that incidents like this are not isolated, but most of it isn’t as visible as a mass shooting.
If a woman’s husband beats her to death, she’s not getting her name on a memorial plaque. But maybe the women who died so tragically at the Ecole Polytechnique can serve as a reminder to the rest of us that there is still an issue here to be dealt with, and we can’t just ignore it.
Actually, no. It’s important to note that they were women. If someone killed over a dozen gay men because they’re gay, or a dozen Asians because they’re Asian, or a dozen Catholics because they’re Catholic, then it’s a form of hate crime. The murders were driven by prejudice and hatred against a certain group of people - members of that group need the world to know what happened, and want to try and prevent this sort of thing from happening again, in any form.