In my imagination “The Internet” descended from the deep reaches of the universe and settled upon our planet like a mist. We began to interact with this powerful and mysterious entity without any real understanding of how it was going to effect us, or even if it was going to effect us. Most of us just assumed it was going to make things better, amplifying potential in a good, rather than harmful way.

However, it hasn’t exactly worked out that way. The astonishing gifts we’ve enjoyed have come with tremendous penalties, the primary of which might be a massive, unacknowledged mental health crisis.

I don’t know about you, but I have never seen as many declarations of anxiety and depression in my life as I now see on a regular basis online. It’s not at all uncommon for me to have multiple chat windows open at once, each one a conversation with a friend in crisis. This is highly subjective of course, and that people now have the means and social sanction to communicate their feelings might be something to celebrate, or, as my intuition suggests,  it could be something in the disembodied interactions we’ve been reducing ourselves to that’s causing this articulated spike in mental health problems.

It seems that the more we inhabit the abstracted realm of The Internet, the more certain we become of our beliefs. This is highly ironic to me, because we all know that amidst the spin and swirl of disinformation, fake news and uncanny algorithms, we should be as skeptical of claims to truth and certainty as we’ve ever been.

Take the White Power symbols that have been in the news.

As you may be aware, the symbol that you always thought meant “OK,” might now mean White Power.

This transition took place about a year ago on 4Chan, where it was conceived as a conscious lie. What I mean by that is that it wasn’t a White Power sign. The intent was to take an existing symbol and change it’s meaning, thus confusing the public and media and further eroding the idea of public trust.

Regardless, once this meme was in the blood stream there was no way to know what the use of the symbol meant. Did the person know it was a white power sign? Were they just saying “OK!?” Were they making a joke? Were they communicating racist ideology?

The first instance of this that I saw was of White House Advisor Zina Bash during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

Based on this image, people thought she was a White Supremacist.

Bash is of Mexican and Jewish heritage, and this photo that was widely circulated was a high resolution screen capture of a video, so she was in motion, not in a fixed, posed position. Claims that she was communicating a racist message seemed to me ambiguous at best. But people I know, like and respect saw this photograph, and others like it,

as crystal clear evidence of racist intent. Where I saw nothing but ambiguity, they saw none.

It felt like looking at the Neckar’s Cube, like some optical illusion was at play and the mechanics of our brains were prohibiting us from seeing the same thing.

There was simply no consensus on what was real. We were living two different stories when looking at the images. Where I was looking at what was directly in front of me, my friends were looking at circumstance, or perhaps subtext, seeing this single image as part of a much greater and evolving narrative.

Perhaps I am antique in my thinking, but when I see stories like these, I look for a kind of “courtroom proof.” If I have doubt, I am unwilling to prosecute the reputation and livelihood of the person being judged, even if they might still be suspicious to me. Maybe that makes me unwilling to act, and if so that is a sin I will one day have to answer for. Regardless, online a “thing” is true if it has momentum, if it supports the continuance of a passionately held belief, not if it meets some “clinical” standard of proof.

As our shared sense of truth and morality fall away– and disagreement leads to suspicion, if not flat-out contempt– we fearlessly share our certainties, but shamefully keep our uncertainties sheltered within, anxious that we’ll be attacked rather than supported by those whom we would love, and that, well that’s making us all feel a little jumpy and untethered.

She lives in the same part of Toronto as I do, and occasionally we bump into one another as we did yesterday when Rachelle and I were at the local park with our two-year old son Jones:

************************************************

Me: Oh, shit.

Rachelle: What?

Me: Two o’clock.

Rachelle: The woman in the cloak?

Me: I thought it was a cape.

Rachelle: No, that’s a cloak.

Me: Ok, whatever. Either way, it’s Margaret fucking Atwood.

Rachelle: I think she’s coming over. I’m going to take Jones to the swings! You two talk on your own!!

( Rachelle and Jones run off as Atwood approaches)

Atwood: Forgive me, but I have to ask, do the police get called very often?

Me: I’m not sure I understand what you mean.

Atwood: You, a middle-aged loner who will never be accepted by his neighbouring, wealthy peers.

Never-quite wearing the right brand and always on the periphery, just shy of conversation, always staring at the children and their pretty young mothers, staring so hard it seems as if you’re trying to fill some interior void that can never stop hungering. I’d think that might make many of the parents nervous.

Me: I think I’m seen more as a kind of guardian, like Batman.

Atwood: Yes, Batman, or perhaps a guardian, like a hollowed-out and mother-dominated crossing guard still living with his deceased parents. Maybe like that, too.

Me: Did you make it to the corn boil here the other day? Blue grass band and everything.

Atwood: Here at Sibelius park?

Me: Yes.

Atwood: No, I was in LA at the Emmy’s.

Me: Funny how the city of Toronto would name a park Sibelius, after a Finnish composer of classical music, before naming one after you, a Canadian writer of impenetrable, mostly hated books. Wonder why that is?

Atwood: I am astonished. You must have been reading your Wikipedia in order to find out who Jean Sibelius was, for surely you thought he was some old Toronto Maple Leaf who died in car crash, no?

Me: JONES!!! NO KICKING!!!! I’M SERIOUS!! I WILL TAKE THAT DIGGER AWAY!!! DON’T THINK I WON’T!!

Atwood: They’re so beautiful at that age. It’s wonderful to see such attentive nurturing, too. With all the advantages you’re giving your son, I am sure he will go far in this world, maybe all the way to The Keg.

Me: I heard you were wearing your housecoat on stage when that thing you wrote so long ago, The Handmaiden’s Tale, won some Emmy for best red outfit worn by a supporting actress, or something.

Atwood: Handmaid’s Tale, and it was awarded Best Drama, amongst several other awards, for being considered a prescient and uncanny representation of Trump’s America.

Me: It’s no Game of Thrones, is all I can say.

Atwood: “Perlen vor Schweinen geworfen,” as they say.

Me: Yeah, whatever.

Atwood: I saw that the *Giller Prize nominees were announced.

Me: JONES!!! I’M NOT TELLING YOU AGAIN!!

Atwood: I couldn’t help but notice you weren’t nominated.

Not even on the long list.

Again.

How does that make you feel, Marcel?

Me: It’s Michael.

Atwood: Right, so sorry.

* The prize awards $100,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English, and $10,000 to each of the finalists.

He was one of the boys I grew up with in Ottawa, and he was a great guy. Modest, kind and good at everything, he was well liked, the sort of person you always wanted around. Parents watching him grow felt proud, confident and happy in the future that was unfolding before him. He was like all the other pure and wonderful boys we grew up amidst, and whenever I saw him, I saw the happy reflection of all of us who grew up together in that neighbourhood, smiling back.

He jumped from the Alexandra Street bridge last week, falling 120 feet before landing in about six feet of water and then pulling himself to the rocks along shore. Using the word miracle, the police officers said that they had never seen a person survive such a high fall into such shallow water.

The Alexandra Street bridge, which was built around 1900, connects Ottawa to the city that lies directly across the river, Hull, Quebec. I cannot express to you just how important Hull was to teenagers growing up in Ottawa during the 1980’s. At the time, Ottawa was a very conservative, even timid place. There were rules that governed everything and an almost soviet conformity enveloped the city like a cloud. However, in Hull the drinking age was 18, you could buy beer at corner stores and bars stayed open until 3:00am. We flocked there by the thousands, crossing the Alexandra bridge like we were a part of some migratory pattern.

For me and my friends, sheltered, underaged kids who only knew optimistic, suburban existences, the unfettered liberty of Hull was a small glimpse into what we imagined the realm of adults could be. It was a place full of potential. Every time we crossed that bridge we felt that a “first” might take place– the narratives of our lives just then beginning to take shape. It was a never-never land where we could dip our feet into the future, while still returning home each night to the safe nest our parents had constructed.

To this day the bridge has the steely permanence of an antique.

Cantilevered, it vibrates when you pass over it, as if an echo of all the trains that once crossed. Our transits, often by foot or bike, were always made at night. With the water in view beneath the cross-hatched metal and the wind, now feeling slightly alien and hostile pushing at you, a feeling of vulnerable and solitude presided. With untethered blackness above and beneath, and the ghostly hum of the bridge moving up through your body, you were in limbo, as if moving from one realm into the next.

It was here on the Alexandra bridge, perhaps feeling lost between these two worlds, where our dear friend decided to step off. He did not do it at night, but during the prosaic, naked day. What was taking place in his heart at that moment must have been indescribably mysterious and painful, a motivating state of mind that’s bleakly impenetrable to the rest of us, who only by the grace of God, have remained on solid ground.

May he forgive himself everything, and find peace in this living world where he will be forever loved. And may he always remember that he pulled himself to shore. The miracle of his life was of his own creation.

Every culture, language, disposition and illness imaginable was there, all lumped together. There were police officers guarding jittery prisoners, old, African women wearing tribal dresses spitting into clay pots, thick-necked Eastern European men with narrow eyes, a furious construction worker with a broken arm and a smirking teen with an infected belly button piercing. Nurses, tough as nails, stood like fire hydrants and shouted down anybody who tried to intimidate their way past triage, while cocky EMT workers, like bodyguards, struck poses around them.

A few affluent people who felt they didn’t belong there looked inconvenienced and glowered busily on their cell phones, every once in awhile looking up, hoping to find the eyes of somebody else who shared their dissatisfaction with customer service, while dotted amongst were the homeless, some of whom were just looking for shelter. They were aware of the disgust the entitled felt about sitting amongst them, and one of them, a holy and ruined man of 60, was an oracle. He issued forth a stream of undirected words, each one burning with some combination of genius, madness and menace, which then hung in the room like the smoke of prophecy.

Toronto, like a lot of cities, or at least by virtue of the way a lot of us assemble in cities, is a de facto gated community. Here, the gate was open. There was something almost Medieval about the scene, the squalor of it, our suffering so intimate and visible, our secrets now manifest. There was no separation of our humanity or of our innate and arbitrary vulnerability—we were all just there, hoping for intervention and mercy.

This, of course, is the destiny of each one of us, but it’s rare that we catch a glimpse of it. We don’t see or share in the suffering of other people on a daily basis. Those people, the sick, scared and wounded, are behind closed doors, and we just imagine that they don’t exist, or that they inhabit a land we will never visit, but this isn’t true.

I was driven to the ER by a cab that day, and I could see the driver’s eyes in the rear view mirror, concerned, looking back at me. (It turns out I had a respiratory virus that was making it very difficult to breathe.) I’m sure he could see that I was scared, and gently he began to speak to me, “It is okay, you are going to be alright, my friend, I can see that. You are going to be fine. Okay? No, I do not need your money. It is my pleasure to have the opportunity to help.” He smiled at me and nodded his head, “Yes, go now, get better, you have a life yet to lead.”

It was as if a saint had taken me in transit, and his blessing, his encouragement was a beautiful miracle unto itself.

We’re holding up pencils, trading memes about not giving in to fear and bravely demanding news agencies reprint the Charlie Hedbo cartoons, often from the comfort of our sofas while watching The Mindy Project or the hockey game. We’re warriors for free speech and we will not be silenced.

It’s ironic that our courage for free speech is predicated largely upon being able to express it through the distant, quasi-anonymous medium of social media, and it’s even more ironic that the massacre in Paris has only an optical relationship to free speech rather than a substantive one.

It seems unlikely that there’s a single person in the West who believes that curtailing free speech in order to placate terrorism is a tolerable, let alone debatable idea. The cartoons in question will go on to colonize the world, and we will gather together by the thousands in public squares to safeguard our liberties. Free speech will not die, not on our watch.

We should presume that the people responsible for these murders knew that this would be the outcome. It is, after all, always the outcome. Whenever an act of terror is committed, a robust surge of patriotism and anger—which we often mistake for courage—follows. Our tribe rises up and begins to throw rocks at their tribe, and last night as people were gathering in Place de la Republique in glowing, peaceful solidarity, others were enacting the revenge narrative by attacking mosques and bombing kebab shops.

France, the nation that banned the covering of the face in public, has a reputation for being one of the more Islamophobic nations in Europe. The cartoons that Charlie Hedbo printed were puerile, designed for provocation more than satiric illumination, I think. By appealing to a ready-made, Muslim-averse public, they were picking low-hanging fruit. In a different context, the cartoons, instead of being seen as heroic, would be seen as offensive, bigoted propaganda.

There are roughly six million Muslims in France, and they comprise about ten percent of the population. Of that six million, approximately a third identify as practicing Muslims, with the rest, many of whom are marginalized immigrants, leading secular lives that presumably include things like Grand Theft Auto, football and beer. The terrorists don’t want these people to be assimilated into French culture, they want them to be radicalized, and to do so they must feel persecuted and unwelcome. I suspect that the point behind the killings was not to quell free speech, but to ratchet up tribal warfare against Muslims, ensuring that for new, would-be recruits, participation in a holy war will always seem like a decent option.

The response then should be to treat the people responsible as criminals, and not as a part of some invisible, ever-present army. Declaring war on an idea rather than a specific, definable entity seems doomed, and as we willingly suspend our civil rights and try to make our collective fear, anger and grief manifest in physical villains, our principles and values, our quality of life, begins to rot from the inside, and right there, the war is lost.

For years there’s been an obdurate, official position that there is to be no negotiating with terrorists. Negotiation, or worse, capitulation would lead to utter catastrophe and societal ruination.

It was a mantra that echoed, even boomed in our heads, and to so much as question it was to let the terrorists win. It’s all a little bit counter-intuitive, because on an personal level, we all know that if somebody we loved were taken hostage, we would negotiate, doing whatever we could to bring that light safely back into our lives. When the stakes are intimate and truly meaningful to us, we only care about the results, not the precedent we’re setting in achieving that result.

In acquiescing to the Guardians of Peace demands and agreeing not to release the movie The Interview, Sony was acting in self-interest.

They were not concerned with freedom of speech or following the US government’s rulebook on dealing with terrorists, or even protecting the vulnerable part-time employees who’d be working in the threatened cinemas over Christmas, or anything else that wasn’t a part of their bottom line.

A corporation is not a moral agency, and it exists for the singular purpose of making money, and whatever serves that interest, whether it’s long-term or short-term, serves the corporation. In tatters and reeling, their internal system almost destroyed, Sony made a rational, tactical decision. Put the movie on the shelf for now and see how it all played out.

What’s interesting is that when money, when the unencumbered progress of private enterprise was put in peril, objectives were met. Now, all sorts of smoke and mirrors surround this, but it reduces to the valuation of corporations over actual humans.

One could argue that the dominant species on the planet are actually corporations. Single-minded and constantly feeding, they’re boundless, traversing and devouring landscapes and cultures like a predatory science fiction behemoth. They must feed, and in so doing behave in a very reptilian, even predictable (if strategic) fashion. Although they may, very weirdly, have some of the same rights and responsibilities as human beings, they’re not human beings and don’t serve the broad interests of the species—they’re just seeking to metastasize, and any concessions that are made to modernity, social progress or environmental stewardship, for instance, are done purely to ensure they’re continuing to maximize profit within an evoloving host.

The lesson to learn here is that when an economic system is disordered, as was Sony’s, then a meaningful tactical response was achieved. Our hearts might break to see hostages taken in a coffee shop in Sydney or journalists executed in a faraway desert, but the terrorist’s goals are not achieved until what really matters is threatened, and that is the free market. Corporations, massive, powerful and ubiquitous, perhaps more powerful than nations, remind me of dinosaurs, and the cyber attacks now threatening them are a virus to which they might be vulnerable, and could ultimately cripple the entire species.

The first image that I saw from the hostage crisis in Sydney was this:

My eye was immediately drawn to the lovely, young woman on the left, her eyes closed as if she could not bear to watch the nightmare she was now living. Softly, it seemed, as if growing faint with disbelief, she and another woman were forced to place the gunman’s sign up in the coffee shop window– just above a cheerful and familiar stencil of Merry Christmas— for the entire world to see. Something very different and beyond our comprehension was replacing the world we knew and loved, and it didn’t matter whether the white Arabic lettering on an ominous black background (making it look like some sort of pirate flag) was authentic ISIS or not, it felt like ISIS and that was sufficient.

To me, this photograph could only mean one thing, and that was that something beautiful and loved was going to be slaughtered before our eyes. Somebody’s perfect child, somebody who was falling in love and building a life, was about to die in the name of a politics few could truly understand. This young woman immediately became a stand-in for every high school girl I had ever known, every waitress or barista I had a secret crush on, in short, every glowing and ascendant person who made my day, or even just the idea of my day, a little brighter.

Halfway around the world in Pennsylvania, another tragedy, one much less publicized, but also containing a thread linking it back to the Middle East, was unfolding. Brad Stone, a marine who had been deployed in Iraq but was now walking with a cane and suffering PTS, was murdering his family. He killed 6 people and seriously wounded another before stabbing himself to death in the nearby woods.

Man Haron Monis, the deeply trouble Iranian-born refugee who caused so much havoc and fear in Sydney, appears to have been so completely deranged as to be almost divorced from politics, but whatever madness possessed him drew him to adopt radical and violent ideologies. Stone, who had fought in Iraq, returned damaged, beyond the nation’s capacity or willingness to salvage. Both of these men proved to be murderous examples of the collateral damage associated with whatever Orwellian title you want to give the ongoing conflicts (War on Terror, Clash of Civilization, Oil Wars) in the Middle East.

Such violent, tragic outbursts are not political statements against policy, but are the vivid, real life consequences of the policy. If a land is bombed and destroyed by an invading nation, both those that do the invading and those that suffer at their hands are damaged in irreparable and unimaginable ways—the experience poisons the soul. There is no winner in such a war, except for the economic machinery that profits from it. The rage, pain and loss of those on the ground can never be measured or contained, and will forever bleed back into the world, manifesting as a furious, sucking whirlpool of such force that everybody is affected.

All day the radio had been warning of this windstorm and the perils it was bringing to civilization, so amidst the sirens in the distance and falling hydro wires, it was easy enough to think that a new and apocalyptic age was being ushered in. Encouraging these feelings of dread was the fact that the grand jury announcement on the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, was to be announced in just a few hours.

(Paul McCulloch, father of Robert)

In a defensive, almost combative tone, St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch (His father was a police officer who was alleged to have been killed by a black suspect when McCulloch was 12-years-old) spoke for nearly 45 minutes, casting aspersions on social media, journalists and Ferguson residents in announcing that officer Darren Wilson would not be charged in the death of Michael Brown.

Nobody was surprised.

This hotly anticipated announcement took place at 9 pm, as if engineered to encourage riots and rebellious protests throughout the night, rather than minimize them. The state was well prepared, of course, and the predictable happened.

It seems that the laws are set-up very specifically to protect police officers from being charged with a crime while in the process of discharging their constabulary duties. This doesn’t feel right. If anything, those wielding power must be held accountable to a higher standard, not freed from one. It is obvious that it’s easier for somebody in power, especially institutional power, to lie and protect that lie, than it is for somebody without power to do so, and if a police officer, with the entire might and authority of his department behind him, kills a teen who does not have a gun,  firing 12 shots that hit him 7 times, then an indictment is essential, if only for the general good of a grieving and shocked community.

It’s widely believed that in America individual rights trump all, that Darren Wilson’s right to protect himself was more important than a community’s right to have the way in which he protected himself tried.

But it often feels like individual rights, the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are merely symbolic, if not smoke and mirrors. It’s the mask America wears, and not the heart beating in the chest.  America seems more interested in protecting private property and capital than it does in the individual rights of people, and nobody lives this reality more painfully and vividly than the African-American community. White fear, a terror that things will be taken from them, has made blacks– who were once property on this soil–an implicit threat, a deadly, almost mystical weapon in and of themselves, that must be dehumanized and controlled, but never truly accepted.

Under the awning girls in tube tops giggle while their boyfriends watch them, imagining lifting their twisting and smiling and screaming bodies up, and carrying them out into the cooling streams of rain– the moment and everybody in it, becoming slick, beautiful and imperishable.

Obviously, I’d make a great leader. I have the physical charisma our culture demands of its politicians, have an agile, encyclopedic brain, speak 6 languages and have a PHD in people. However, since I sincerely believe that fame is a curse, I refuse to put my wife and dog through the constant, ceaseless scrutiny that my taking office would entail, so I say, once again, I will not be running for Mayor of Toronto.

This does not mean that I am abdicating my civic duty to the great, multicultural, world-class city of Toronto. I have just signed on (salary and benefits part of a non-disclosure agreement) to be a part of the Duck For Mayor (@duckformayor on Twitter) team working to elect a duck for mayor of Toronto. My duties will be vast, but one of the first things I will be doing is forming a coherent platform that serves all Torontonians, something that I will be unveiling through a series of Tweets on Twitter.

@duckformayor: The carnage in Chinatown must be stopped!

@duckformayor: When I am mayor of Toronto, I will raze Chinatown!

@duckformayor: Both of them!

@duckformayor: Duck for Mayor will be a just Mayor, but a vengeful one!

@duckformayor: Tough on crime!

@duckformayor: Not afraid to walk the walk.

@duckformayor: Duck for Mayor supports the brave police officers of the Greater Toronto Area!

@duckformayor: Unlike some candidates, Duck for Mayor has never been convicted of drunk driving! #RobFordHas

@duckformayor: Plan to restructure transits includes, canals, canals, canals!

@duckformayor: Subways already flooding, why not leave them that way?

@duckformayor: HUGE taxpayer savings in foregoing repair costs!

@duckformayor: Also, tourists will love gondola rides through Toronto’s famous underground canals!

@duckformayor: Come on, Toronto, think big, vote Duck!

@duckformayor: Rumours of my affair with Margaret Atwood have been greatly exaggerated. #TorontoStarIsTrash

@duckformayor: Classy lady, though, don’t have a bad word to say about her.

@duckformayor: Did some great camping together back in the day.

@duckformayor: Canals, canals, canals!

@duckformayor: Anybody else missing GOT as much as I am? #OnlyWithdrawlThisDuckKnows

@duckformayor: Death to Chinatown!!