CRAVEN BUS PASSENGERS

“The silence of the Canadian lambs” –Mark Steyn, Maclean’s March 23^rd.

Mark Steyn’s column makes a trenchant and sobering point regarding Canadian “manhood”, and I must rethink my earlier animadversion of his “gunslinger” writing. I have wondered why there were no real criticisms of the passive –dare I say cowardly – behaviour displayed by the passengers; either by the court, the press nor even the victim’s family. There is a rather important difference between this incident and the one depicted in Politechnique. Marc Lepine had a gun –a semi-automatic rifle –rather more lethal than the knife used by Vincent Li. You can fight a knife up close, but not a bullet from a rifle shooter several feet away. Yes, New York City also comes to mind, where a whole neighbourhood ignored the screams of a woman being stabbed to death. Yet, even there, the situation was not as immediate, near or as easily evaluated by the neighbours. The bus passengers knew exactly what was happening, but chose to run away. Unfortunately for Tim McLean, there was no Liviu Librescu or a Lee Gordon Brown to take charge; rather than a “let’s roll!” it was “let’s run!”

I don’t know how many “men” there were out of the three dozen passengers on the bus, and the bus driver, but I find the impuissance of the passengers difficult to comprehend. The sheep mentality of the bus crowd running for the exit while a madman was steadily butchering Tim McLean does not reflect positively on anyone there; and that includes the stalwart RCMP constables who spent 4.5 hours navel-gazing and watching the butchery and cannibalism proceeding inside the bus. It’s hard to square this behaviour with the no-nonsense, proactive action taken by their brothers in arms at the Vancouver airport when a crazed and confused immigrant did nothing worse than swing a stapler over his head.

I sincerely hope that the timidity of the Greyhound passengers is not a reflection of a society where pacifism has gone mad –where “mind your own business” has become a mantra for all –but I am at a loss to understand the craven behaviour of Tim McLean’s fellow passengers on that fateful journey on the Greyhound bus.