We know the Humboldt victims, even if we've never met them: Robyn Urback

For the past week, Canada has been a small town. The crash that took the lives of 16 people happened just a few kilometres away, even though the map says it's beyond a few provincial borders. The families of the injured and deceased are the neighbours we haven't yet met, who warmed their hands under the same heaters in the local arena that went by a different name. We want to drop off frozen dinners and clean laundry, but we'll settle for putting hockey sticks out on our porches instead.

The collision between the bus carrying members of the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team and a tractor-trailer in rural Saskatchewan is unlike almost every other tragedy to grip our nation in recent years simply because there's really no one, and nothing, to blame: no radical ideology that turned a lowly drifter into a Parliament Hill killer, no railway employees to prosecute for 47 derailment-related deaths, not even a carbon emissions policy we can point to (somewhat spuriously) in trying to explain a massive wildfire that displaced thousands from their home.

Granted, some have directed their anger toward the driver of the tractor-trailer, but many others recognize the futility in assigning blame.

It was a terrible accident, after all; what's the point in reserving animosity for someone who will live out the rest of his life in a hell of his own self-censure?

This is new for us. We're so used to fighting over whether we can call what happened "terrorism" or about the merits of transporting oil by pipelines versus rail that we almost don't know how to process this new sense of unity. Twitter handles with names likes "TrudeauMustGO" are actually "liking" pictures of the prime minister visiting injured players in hospital. Indeed, for the past few days, it hasn't mattered what team you're usually on. 

That said, there will always be those who pop up in the wake of tragedy to cast a critical eye on our collective reaction. This is not necessarily a bad thing; we should not stop thinking just because we are hurting. But appropriate timing and careful tact are, of course, key.

In the wake of Humboldt, there have been a few who have questioned why we seem to be paralyzed by the news of the crash in Saskatchewan but give hardly more than a perfunctory acknowledgment of the school bus crash in India days later that killed 27 people, including 23 children.

Others have pointed out that Canadians are generously opening their wallets to donate to the GoFundMe for Humboldt families and survivors but seem not to care a whit about the ongoing suffering of Syrian families made to endure another horrific chemical attack.

And one activist and writer made a point on Twitter about the whiteness and maleness of the Humboldt victims (though Dayna Brons, the one woman on the bus, is among the deceased) in the context of wishing for similar outpourings of grief for daily tragedies where the victims are not white or male.

Surely some readers will ask why I'm even bothering to acknowledge what seem to be agenda-driven fringe views. But these ideas aren't really that fringe: last year, the Globe and Mail's Elizabeth Renzetti wrote a column in the wake of the Westminster attack asking we why mourn for Britain but not Nigeria or Yemen. This network explored a similar idea a couple years earlier about the November 2015 Paris terror attacks.

So it's not entirely unprecedented that someone now would ask, "Where's the GoFundMe for the bus victims in India?"

There is no simple way to explain why we become rapt in tragedy that happens on Western soil — whether in our own backyards or an ocean away — and ignore, in relative terms, those that occur elsewhere, but I think it comes down to this: so much of collective mourning is about empathy.

We understand life in Britain better than we do life in Nigeria or Yemen, and we can imagine the shock, pain and horror that must come with learning that a car drove into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge better than we can a Boko Haram attack in Nigeria. We can put ourselves in their shoes — what if the same thing happened on the Champlain Bridge? — and comprehend what they must be feeling.

• School bus crash in India kills at least 23 children
• 500 Syrians treated for symptoms of gas poisoning in Douma, WHO says

I don't doubt that skin colour has some effect on the empathy factor, but I think the connection goes deeper than that. Canadians mourned with the victims of the 2017 Quebec City mosque massacre not because some of them happened to share the same religion or skin colour but because we understood the devastation; we can conceive of how earth-shattering it would be watch a loved one go to a house of worship in an ostensibly safe city and not return home.

The problem with empathy is that you can't will yourself — or shame someone else — into feeling it. We think we care about the Syrian refugee crisis, for example, but it doesn't punch you in the gut until you see the body of a little Syrian boy washed up on the beach wearing the same velcro runners you just bought for your toddler. It's not a particularly noble way to be, but it's human.

The remoteness of tragedies in India or Syria or Nigeria, and the unfamiliarity with the way they unfold, makes them harder to connect with. 

Not so with the Humboldt victims and their families. We understand the grief that has seized the Humboldt community because we can picture putting our own sons, daughter, friends and brothers on the same sort of charter buses and sending them off to the same sort of hockey tournaments somewhere in Canada. We know junior hockey teams aren't supposed to lose 16 members in a few dire seconds on a rural road. We understand that this could have happened in any of our own communities.

We mourn with Humboldt because we can viscerally feel their pain. We know the victims, even if we've never actually met them.

This column is part of CBC's Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read this editor's blog and our FAQ.