The real tragedy is that we care, but just not enough - Michael's essay

What's missing here? What's missing in all the anxious and angry debate, in all the hand-wringing, the breast-pounding, the finger-pointing and the second guessing? What is the mercurial, mystifying, evanescent truth that has been smothered in the tired, wheezing rhetoric? 

It is this truth: that we just don't care. Or that we just don't care enough to do anything. Oh, maybe we care, perhaps, for a day or two, a week maybe, a month and then the caring, along with the interest fades. Until the next time.

Eleven of our young fellow humans tried to kill themselves on a Saturday night in a far away remote place none of us will ever have to live in, and whose name we can barely pronounce. Where children think as much about suicide as they do about homework.

We have our own needs, our own pain, our own children to worry about. Oh there is movement. There is action. Planes from the south bring intelligent, caring, educated people with good teeth, smart clothes, and briefcases, yearning, burning to help, to do something.

There is shock across the country. Our leaders were shocked, they said so. Shocked but not surprised. This movie has unspooled before. We all know the vocabulary of  the story of Indian people - despair, anger, frustration, violence, isolation, trauma, poverty.

A former prime minister says he knew about the problems back in 1968 when he was the minister in charge; everybody knew about the Problems. Awareness goes back a hundred years or so, to the time when Ottawa set out to kill the Indian in the child. So the children were sent to special schools.

We've known for decades about the undrinkable water. We've known for decades about the sewage systems that don't work, the porous housing that lets in the cold, the overcrowding, the crappy schools. We have known for decades about the alcoholism, the stabbings and shootings and the domestic violence.

The Indian people have done everything they could think of to get our attention. In 1987, a Manitoba chief invited the South African ambassador to Canada to compare racisms. The media made a huge deal of it. In 2012, four First Nations women started a protest called Idle No More. One of them, from Attawapiskat incidentally, went on a hunger strike. The media made a huge deal of it.

The Harper government did do something; it killed the $5-billion Kelowna accord of 2005 which would have turned a page in the relations between the First Nations and the rest of us. The former prime minister who engineered the thing said killing it was "immoral." The Harper government later went after the people of Attawapiskat to repay $1.8 million in unaccounted for government grants. Where was the money? What did you do with it? What's the matter, is there no H and R Block in Attawapiskat? Why can't they get an accountant like the rest of us?

There is some kind of grisly irony that we talk about Attawapiskat and its children in the week when a UN report says Canada is failing its poorest children everywhere. In 2013, Canada ranked 17th out of 29 countries in its treatment of our poorest children. In this week's report we are 26th out of 35.

It is in times like these, with events like these, that we should stop. Just stop. We should just stop and ask what kind of place is this, and what kind of people do we want to be? We can open our arms to thousands of the poor and the wretched from Syria or Africa or Vietnam, or some place. We have it in us to do that. We have always done it. How can we open our arms and face one way and in the doing turn our backs on the suffering in this, our own place?

We just don't care. Or we just don't care enough.