First, a flash of red. Then, the barrel of a gun.
The figure is darting too quickly between cars to make out his face, demeanour, intentions. I am in one of those cars, and there’s nowhere to drive but straight ahead, towards the gun. Except no one is driving at all: we are stuck. Vehicles are popping out of the lines along the four-lane highway, made into an impromptu six-lane highway by determined Lebanese vacationers on the dusty road from Beirut to the Roman ruins of Baalbek.
The only person with options is holding a firearm and wearing a blood-red shirt.
A couple more frenetic foot maneuvers (his) and a click of door-locks (mine), and he reaches the side of the road. Turns. Lifts his gun’s barrel over the hood of the car to my right and, for some reason that there isn’t time enough to fathom, points it directly at me.
Everything stills. And finally comes into focus.
The gunman is a child. The gun is a toy. The kid puffs his cheeks out to make a noise I can’t hear, lets his imaginary weapon off with an imaginary recoil. And just as spontaneously as he’d fake-shot me, he runs across the highway again, knees as high as a sprinter’s, in search of a new target.
While the child went back to playing in traffic with a toy Kalashnikov, I went back to being scared in Lebanon. Not very scared — just, after being around for several shootings (not pretend) and several bombings (also not pretend), I was a little bit afraid quite a lot of the time. This low-intensity, atmospheric kind of fear is easily denied when family or friends ask about its existence, even while it subtly but surely presses upon what you see in the world, what sense you make of the world, what you give the world. It can make you perceive threats where there is only a child, and danger where there is only a toy.
Ottawa, having felt the body-seizing agony of a violent attack on a soldier and on Parliament, may now feel the dull, pulsing throb of knowing that life isn’t safe. In the lingering haze of gun-smoke, it may be difficult to differentiate a menace from a phantom, because these often feel the same, or to tell a security measure from an assault on democratic freedoms, because these often feel the same too. A convert to Islam can look like a future terrorist; a civil liberties violation like a necessary safety precaution.
Civil liberties — spectacular and towering liberties like the right to privacy, to a fair trial, to citizenship — are the first things we laud our societies for when we’re not afraid and the first things we throw away when fear descends. The false assumption of safety is that, to protect our liberties, we must lose them.
But we can never be completely safe. That doesn’t mean never being afraid. By all means, fear things. But above all else, fear the person who promises to make fear go away. Even if that person is yourself. Even if it’s your representative.
We should be vigilant, yes, but chiefly against our own inclination to seek sanctuary when the need for sanctuary has ebbed, and against our willingness to barter the liberties we need for the security we can never wholly have.
Ottawa, having been made to convulse with panic, could become stuck in it. But many residents — witnesses, even — want to drive through and beyond the fear, steering toward the society that we want to be: democratic, fair and free. For whatever small amount it may be worth, imaginary and real gunmen be damned, I soon made it to Lebanon’s ruins of Baalbek. Towering high above millennia of winds and wars, they are spectacular.
Shannon Gormley is a Canadian journalist.
