Minding my tone

When I speak or write about the Air India tragedy, I tend to get very passionate (even preachy) about how we failed the victims through a botched investigation and a collective, national indifference to what happened. I realize that this isn’t entirely fair to the people who did respond appropriately to the tragedy from the eighties to the present.
 
While passion and anger are appropriate at times, I have been counselled (sometimes overtly and sometimes through passive suggestion) that there are times when a more subdued tone needs to be employed. Speaking in sweeping indictments is often not helpful.
 
This has been revealed to me over the years through a few key encounters and reflection on the entirety of the Air India story.

• When I spoke about the tragedy in academic (I’m a retired teacher) and social settings, I was frequently greeted with blank stares. I see this as a failure on my part to communicate the message I was trying to convey. Perhaps I was employing too much anger and disgust, and my audience didn’t know how to respond. By and large, speaking about Air India tended to be a conversation killer in many situations. There may have been other factors at play but, ultimately, I must take responsibility for not moving the dialogue along to facilitate a more thorough examination of what happened before and after those Air India planes were targeted so many years ago.
• When I finished my first draft of My Father’s Secret, my editor read the original ‘Author’s Note’ and told me to scrap it. She said, “Your reader doesn’t want to be bludgeoned after reading your novel.” She was right. The original ‘Author’s Note’ saw me launch into a stern lecture on the entire terrorist event, and the many failing of the Canadian national security, law enforcement, and government systems. The re-written ‘Author’s Note’ is much more subtle and, I think, more powerful. I give the reader the information without telling them how to feel about it.
• Shortly after publication, three of my readers shared stories of being connected to some of the victims. One described being a little boy and learning that someone in their neighbourhood had died on the plane. He told me about neighbourhood families rallying and visiting their devastated neighbour, bringing food and comfort to them before they headed to Ireland to identify the remains of their family member. Two other people spoke of friends and relatives who knew children who died in the bombing. Of the 329 killed on Flight 182, eighty-six were children, six of whom were infants. One of my readers shared the story of a close friend who has never been the same since her childhood friend was killed on Air India Flight 182 in 1985. Another reader, whose wife was close friends with one of the victims as a little girl, got a tattoo to memorialize her lost friend.
• While I rip into the investigators and government in My Father’s Secret and in my reflections on the Air India tragedy, there are no doubt many CSIS, RCMP and legal professionals who worked tirelessly to bring those responsible to justice. While they ultimately failed, their efforts should never be under-estimated. There are also journalists who chased the story and exposed the truth:
  • Tara Singh Hayer was paralyzed after being shot and later murdered for implicating those he said were responsible for the bombings.
  • His friend, Kim Bolan, was subject to death threats for her reporting.
  • Terry Milewski continues to speak out about the bombings and the movement that inspired it.
• The families of the Air India victims have never stopped telling the story of the gross injustice that their loved ones have suffered—in 1985 and the decades since the bombing. They must have felt like they were speaking into a vacuum as the government and the majority of Canadians maintained their largely muted response to the worst terrorist attack in this nation’s history. While the government of Canada did eventually apologize and take responsibility for their failure (25 years after the bombing), the average Canadian still frowns and shrugs their shoulders when they hear about the terrorist attacks. Ambivalence in the face of an historic tragedy. 

 
This is why I need to be mindful to watch my tone at times. There are plenty of people who have given their all to understanding what happened in 1985. There are many who have used their broken hearts to appropriately mourn the lives lost. And there are many who will not let our nation forget what happened on June 23, 1985.