Goodbye, Jack, Part II

"We can do this, we can be a better people. We've seen how to try"

--Rev. Brent Hawkes

Reading what I wrote a few days back, I feel a little guilty. I feel like I wrote a standard eulogy for a standard man, not the standard bearer that Jack Layton actually was. I won't delete my prior effort--I don't do that, ever--but I'd like to refine it in the wake of watching his wake.

We're told Jack died listening to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" performed by k.d. lang.

I can think of few better songs to die to.

"Why do you want to watch this funeral?" my wife asked me. I struggled to answer. After all, I didn't know Jack, nor ever even meet him. It was hard to reconcile that with the profound sense of loss I have felt since he died. I feel, quite frankly, as if we have lost in Jack Layton a rare breed of person, let alone politician: an eternal optimist and a bottomless fount of compassion and caring.

Not everyone feels this way.

There has been a remarkable level of vitriol on display this past week, starting with Christie Blatchford's anti-elegy before the body was even cold. Christie was a paragon of civility compared to the vile spewings of any number of anonymous posters elsewhere. My jaw has dropped so often it's gone numb: the hatred is palpable. If Layton wasn't already dead, you get the distinct feeling some people would have been all too happy to kill him.

Whence came the hatred in Canadian political discourse? Has it always been here, and I've just been blind to it? Left or right, it makes no matter: there is little tolerance for opposing viewpoints and less for those who hold them. An honest debate very quickly degenerates into name-calling and worse. And saddest of all, it seems that for every person mourning Jack Layton, there is another glad he's dead and happy to say so.

Personally, I shared many of Jack's beliefs. I share his idealism, and on some level, his optimism. That so many Canadians obviously don't means that there remains a great deal of work to be done. It distresses me that so many have been hurt so badly they see no other way to heal themselves than to hurt others. That's certainly not what Jack was about, nor is it any way to build a better Canada.

Why, why now, or why Jack. Some of those questions...will have no answer.

The reality is not why, but what now?--Rev. Hawkes

That sermon was perhaps the best I've ever heard in my life. I'll freely admit to a need for occasional spiritual sustenance, and don't care if you think it a weakness. Rev. Hawkes' homily was a feast of uncommon richness. (Link to transcript here).

Few who ever met Jack. by all accounts, will ever forget him. I hope that his life's work continues now that his life is done. I hope I can help advance it in some small way.

I hope.