SHAME

Spirit Vigils were held all across Canada yesterday in memory of the more than 500 aboriginal women who have disappeared in the last three decades.

Vanished.

Gone.

This news story was given a tiny bottom corner of page A4 in the Globe. The Province newspaper did cover the story with a bit more of the attention it deserves.

First, there is the tragedy itself of young lives wasted.

Then, to add insult to injury is the astonishing lack of interest such a disaster seems to warrant.

How jaded and indifferent have we become?

I've written previously on this site that if 3 white Anglo-Saxon women were missing, the militia would be on watch.

But these are not white Anglo-Saxon women. They are natives. And many were prostitutes.

And now, we seem to take all of this in our stride, as if this is the way things are and this is perhaps the way things should be and what can I do about it anyway?

I can do many things. I can talk about the issue in public. I can encourage and poke the police into taking these matters seriously. Remember how long it took for the police to act in the Picton case and the Highway of Tears?

I can lobby politicians to wake up. I can get to know some aboriginal students or community leaders and help bridge the cultural gaps that still separate us dreadfully.

Please note that whenever I write about these missing women, a horrible man (I am assuming he is a man, of some sort.) sends me an anonymous comment in which he cheers. He says that these women are scum and that they deserve to be killed. I don't publish his comments. They are unbearably ugly. He is sick.

And our indifference is sick.

The fact that 520 Canadian sisters are missing is a tragedy and a shameful fact.

Remind someone in authority today.