UPDATE: An eerie self-biography of Kimveer Gill, found in the Google Cache.
UPDATE #2: I've created a Podcast to accompany this post.
Today is September 14th, 2006.
Today, taking the subway from my home to downtown Montreal, everyone was reading their "Metro" newspaperoid and sitting silently in the train car. People eyed each other suspiciously - more than usual - and it seemed that everyone was a little on edge. I'm naturally the kind of person who looks around alot, directly at people, constantly examining my surrounding environment. Whether it's natural curiosity or ADHD I don't really know, but today everyone I looked at seemed to avert their eyes quicker, as if they felt I was staring them down, accusing them.
Maybe I was.
What happened yesterday at Dawson - and what will continue to happen in the media until the next big story comes along - is, to me, a bleak reminder that the world is broken. Though I'd love to attribute why "this happened here" to our new conservative ungovernment, they haven't been in power long enough to take the blame, unfortunately. Well, at least they can take credit for the 30+ Canadians dead in Afghanistan so far, sent there with inadequate training and equipment to fight what is basically a ghost army. Only the US and the UK have lost more troops than us. By population, though, more Canadians have died.
In a few days, though, we'll all go back to fawning over the new iPods (from Steve Jobs, who hoards his riches like a next-generation Rockerfeller), buying our cigarettes and gas from industries that help keep the American military-industrial complex in power, and wait for the next episode of 24 from Fox [News], feeding imperialism's thirst for propaganda a little more every time we watch.
Kimveer Gill - the 25 year old who shot all those people yesterday - wasn't born any different than you or me. If you go back far enough, you'll see that the same blood that flows flowed 
through his veins also streams through ours. The world he was immersed in was no different than ours until he got lost in a gothic vampire fantasy-land. But what led to that transition? Why did he feel a need to be different?
This morning on the metro, I could've been in any big city with a subway system... but I didn't feel like I was in Montreal. I felt like I was on the tube in London, one of the cleanest, most sterile, and dreariest places I've ever been in my life. Everyone has their little headphones plugged into their ears, with their shit-on-a-page of the day in their hands, completely disconnected from the world around them. Their experience of "being on the subway" consisted of "being anywhere but" - I think that someone could dropped dead on that train without anyone noticing. Maybe that feeling was exarcebated by the fact that I had just returned from a two-month stint in Cuba - one of the last bastions of humanism I've found - but it made me want to just break down in the middle of the train and start yelling "What the hell is wrong with you people?!?"
Instead, I kept listening to my iPod and reading my morning paper.
Mr. Gill didn't always want to kill 'innocent' people, or be - ahem - a 'vampire'. He thought that he could find uniqueness within that subculture. So there he was, "Kimveer The Vampire" (ahem) driving to Dawson College in his black Pontiac Sunfire (ahem) with a rifle in his trunk. In a sea of billboards, magazines, television, 'fashion' and pseudo-culture, he somehow decided that his identity wasn't unique enough, that he wasn't "different" enough. Well, "being the same" is "the new different".
We are seeing an entire generation - mine, and the next - weaned on spoon-fed, carefully crafted messages and ideas created to shove us into this or that path. Everything we're feeling today, all of our emotions, our great ideas, and our fears have been thought, felt and experienced thousands of time of thousands of people before us. All those people in the subway this morning shared the same distress and anxiety together, which has been felt for eons. We're simultaneously allowing the powers that be cover up our true inherent individuality with media messages, fashion, capitalism and "culture" while we're cheating ourselves out of the unity and sharing that was supposed to be our nature. While they create a feudal hierarchy and give us false senses of identity through the things they make us think we want, we're losing the ability to think for ourselves, to discern what we need to do to build the world we wanted to when we were newborns and infants. It's a lose-lose situation.
We are not united, but we are not unique either. Artificially created ideas of how to live our lives has made good little servants of us.
It's perfectly normal and acceptable that some of us get lost along the wayside. What's most troublesome to me is when we take others along with us who weren't necessarily ready to go.