Good People

He purposefully walked towards the podium, then stood before us, his figure tall and imposing. Starting on the left of the room his gaze washed over us, gentle and intentional. Silence descended like a warm blanket over us, somehow safe and exposed simultaneously by his eyes. Then he spoke, a voice in one breath peaceful and powerful: You all look like good people.

I was at a talk organized by a group called Streams of Justice and we had just heard a presentation on the gruesome history of residential schools in Canada run by the church and the recent recompensing that the government was making. Aboriginal children removed from their communities and families to be socialized and reformed. Their language and culture was to be educated out of them and the even greater tragedy was the rampant abuse and neglect that occurred while attending residential schools. The monetary settlements themselves sounded gruesome to me. They give different forms of abuse a different value, so many dollars for being beaten, a different amount for anal penetration, and the list continues.

We put numbers and dollar amounts on people's pain . . . on people's lives.

Evil happens because good people sit back and do absolutely nothing. His gentle words cut straight to my heart.

He shared with passion how his sisters and brothers had been affected and are now further wounded by the settlements that are being proposed. One hundred years of children affected. I hurt, I hurt because who we are is beautiful human beings, as beautiful and precious as anyone else. What we need to understand is how to heal. We need to heal.

The first step in the oppression of other people is that we objectify them and they are no longer people. 'Indians', not human beings, the 'Indian problem.'

So, good people, are we to continue to do nothing? To walk by the human beings who sit on the street who cannot heal themselves. Are we to continue to do that as good people?

As I left, I told myself in no uncertain terms: I don't ever want to be one of those good people who does nothing.