The unfathomable hatred that would prompt someone to try to bomb hundreds of happy little children is enough to stop you in your tracks.
The devices were placed on the legislature grounds with the knowledge that tens of thousands of people would gather there to celebrate Canada Day. They were there simply for some fun in the sun, with most sparing a few moments for warm feelings of goodwill about the country’s 146th birthday party.
To think someone would contemplate even the slightest potential of turning that happy time into the kind of grotesque carnage that Victorians only glimpse on TV newscasts from far away is chilling.
Over the next couple of years, the judicial process will grind through the background to Tuesday’s revelations. All the procedural details of how such an obscenity could be conceived will trickle out. But the sociopathic disconnect that would allow someone to dream this up? That’s going to be a lot tougher to figure out.
Police offered the theory of a self-radicalized individual with a recent commitment to the “al-Qaida” ideology as an explanation. Maybe the idea stemmed from some self-taught interpretation of that abomination.
Or maybe, as it appears in the early going, the hate that inspired the plan was there all along, and the conversion crystallized it.
The only reassuring thing likely to come out of all the evidence is how thoroughly on top of the situation the police and intelligence services were. Explanations to date suggest they watched the plot develop, helped the plotters incriminate themselves thoroughly and intervened to make sure that whatever the couple thought they were building would never detonate.
Then they scooped them up and charged them.
It stands as a shining example of great police work, which prompted Premier Christy Clark to offer her heartfelt appreciation to everyone involved.
“Their work is dangerous and they put themselves at considerable personal risk every single day ... and many of the things they do we never see it, we never know about it. But thank goodness they do it.”
NDP Leader Adrian Dix also spoke about confronting violence, from a personal perspective. Two members of his extended family died in the Lockerbie and Air India mass murders.
“We have to continue together to be determined to oppose violence in all its forms,” he said.
The political response on Tuesday consisted of everyone bustling around the building doing exactly what they usually do.
But I had a newfound appreciation for all the arcane rituals of a legislative session, given that there was a plot that could conceivably have endangered them and everyone involved in them.
Some MLAs got up and spoke about good works underway in their constituencies. They were stories about people who build things, not blow them up. Those tales are mundane because 99 per cent of the population is inclined the same way. We help people, we volunteer, we chip in.
And when we differ, we argue or vote against the other side, or yell at public meetings.
We don’t fill pressure cookers with shrapnel “for the purpose of causing death,” as the charges read.
Hours after the announcement of the most serious threat ever made against the legislature, there was a half-hour of relatively good-natured argument about B.C. Hydro cost overruns. Government and Opposition members were clashing over policy, as they have for ages. But it was an intelligent difference of opinion expressed verbally. That’s how people with any degree of humanity do it.
Justice Minister Suzanne Anton reflected later in the day that British Columbians live in a secure place under the rule of law.
“That’s why people come to B.C., that’s why people want to invest in B.C., that’s why people want their families to be here, because we’re generally a safe place,” she said.
“It’s very dismaying that this happened at all, but it did come to a safe resolution.”
There’s an old British war poster that’s been getting a nostalgic second go-round lately: “Keep Calm and Carry On.”
That was the operative mode for the legislature and it should apply to everyone.
