On 6 December 1989, fifteen years ago today, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. He killed them because they were women; Lepine told men to leave and shot at women as he screamed I hate feminists.

6 December is a day of remembrance for the women who were killed. They were:

• Geneviève Bergeron, aged 21
• Hélène Colgan, 23
• Nathalie Croteau, 23
• Barbara Daigneault, 22
• Anne-Marie Edward, 21
• Maud Haviernick, 29
• Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31
• Maryse Leclair, 23
• Annie St.-Arneault, 23
• Michèle Richard, 21
• Maryse Laganière, 25
• Anne-Marie Lemay, 22
• Sonia Pelletier, 28; and
• Annie Turcotte, aged 21

The Montreal Massacre was horrifying and shocking. But we also have to remember that it’s less unusual than we all think. Yes, it’s a terrible freak event that some madman massacred women he had never even met because of his sociopathic hatred. But every day women are raped, beaten, and killed by men–and it’s usually not by strangers, but by men they know and thought they could trust. They are attacked just because they are women–because the men who assault them believe that they have the right to control women’s lives and their sexual choices, and to hurt them or force them if they don’t agree. By conservative estimates, one out of every four women is raped or beaten by an intimate partner sometime in her life. Take a moment to think about that. How much it is. What it means for the women who are attacked. What it means for all women who live in the shadow of that threat.

To be serious about creating a free and just society, we have to be serious about ending violence against women. As Andrea Dworkin puts it (speaking about sexual assault), I want to see this men’s movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can’t be self-indulgent. And the same is true of every form of everyday gender terrorism–stalking, battery, rape, murder. How could we face Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Maria Klucznik, Maryse Leclair, Annie St.-Arneault, Michèle Richard, Maryse Laganière, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, and Annie Turcotte, and tell them we did anything less?

Take some time to keep the 14 women who were killed in the Montreal massacre in your thoughts. If you have the money to give, make a contribution to your local battered women’s shelter. And, as Jennifer Barrigar writes:

Every year I make a point of explaining that I’m pointing the finger at a sexist patriarchal misogynist society rather than individual men. This year I choose not to do that. The time for assigning blame is so far in the past (if indeed there ever was such a time), and that conversation takes us nowhere. This is the time for action, for change. Remember Parliament’s 1991 enactment of the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women — the glorious moment when every single womyn in the House stood together and claimed this Day of Remembrance. Remember what we can and do accomplish — all of us — when we work together. It is time to demand change, and to act on that demand. Let’s break the cycle of violence, and let’s do it now.

Remember. Mourn. Act.

In memoriam… 9/11/2001

One year ago today, the world stood still as carnage and madness consumed New York City and Washington DC. I remember that just a bit before I was supposed to leave for school at 9:00 my mother came in and told me that she’d heard on the car radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I turned on the television next to my computer and saw it there. The massacre unfolding before all our eyes on live television. The home video of that explosion and the screams. I don’t even remember how I went through the rest of the day — I know I went to school. Silent crowds of people—a few whispering around the edges—stood fixed in front of the television screens in Haley Center. None of us knew what to do but stand there.

I’m not going to wax elegiac or maudlin about it today. I’m told that there has been wall to wall media coverage for the past week or so, but I’m cut off from TV right now so I have been mercifully spared most of it. I am tired of the soft violins and the misty-focus interviews and the incessant attempts to wrap up this ugly, horrible crime in some kind of lyrical closure. Well, closure doesn’t exist. Some 2,000 people were brutally murdered and there is nothing that can close the wounds — no heartfelt words, no bombing of foreign lands, no teevee specials will ever bring them back.

Solace is the best we can strive for. Take a moment at 8:46am and 10:30am to silently remember those who died in that awful day. There will be performances of Mozart’s Requiem being sung around the world (including here in Auburn)—take the time out of your evening to listen to it, if you can. You don’t need to put on any big production of mourning. Just remember, and be still, for a while.

Amongst the Living

In Memory of the Dead

At 8:15am a solitary bell rang in Hiroshima. Doves were released and the names of some 4,977 people were placed underneath an arch-shaped memorial. Today’s memorial ceremony marked the 57^th anniversary of the atomic holocaust in Hiroshima, in which over 220,000 people were killed by the firestorm, shockwave, radiation poisoning, cancers, and various other illnesses.

It’s become more or less a commonplace on the Left to recognize that Hiroshima was an atrocity, a crime against humanity inflicted upon innocent people by the US government. And while there remains a great deal of resistence among the media elites to understanding the horror of Hiroshima in the same terms as the horror of Auschwitz or the Killing Fields or September 11, it is far from an unspoken truth.

So let me merely say: Let us pause for a moment to remember those who died today. And let us celebrate those who live on and who work for a more peaceful, loving world.

Thousands Feared Dead as World Trade Center Is Toppled [New York Times]. I heard on NPR that it is feared that as many as 10,000 may have died in the explosions, fire, and collapse of the buildings.

The death toll of these dramatic events is still unknown. In a press conference this afternoon, Mayor Giuluiani would not speculate but warned that the numbers "would be more than anyone can bear." There are more than 1500 "walking wounded" being treated in makeshift medical triages around the city, 600 in hospitals and 200 additional victims in critical condition. Many of the wounded and suspected fatalities include medical staff and firefighters who were at the base of the WTC before the buildings collapsed. [NYC IMC]

Several witnesses said they saw bodies falling from the twin towers and people jumping out before the first of the buildings collapsed in a roar of rubble and smoke. The other tower fell about half an hour after that. [New York Times]

I have nothing more to say today. There are no words.