I regret to inform you...
Apologies without action are sorry indeed
BY Heather Mallick
Photography by Reuters: Chris Wattie
There’s nothing like a good apology. I’m sorry, but I just love saying that. An apology is shorthand, emotional rehab writ small.
“I’m sorry” is what you preface a statement of unhappy fact with. I’m sorry but... Salon.com under its new editor has become very bad and I cannot send you $45 for a premium subscription;... everything in your clothing store makes me look and feel like Sharon Tate and the fact that the name means nothing to you, young Zara staff, is worrying;...please stop emailing me. It’s a buffer.
“I’m very sorry if” is what people say when they mean “I’m very sorry that.” For instance, “I’m very sorry if I offended anyone” is the standard cowardly thing to say to people who were truly offended, which is why you were driven to offer a halfbaked apology in the first place. Only weasels back into an apology that way. Listen for a beeping sound in the background.
“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry” is what people say when they really are. I might accept this kind of torrential apology-it sounds lovely-but no one has ever offered it to me. I have a list a metre long of people who should, but it’s not going to happen, is it?
Human hurts are too intricate to be undone by apologies. We superficially accept them because we have to, but the damage still registers and we expect recompense, whether it’s a week of emotional servitude or things that gleam on the ring finger.
But regret only fails with élan when it’s done on a large scale. And that’s when the grotesquerie of government apologies really makes itself known.
I put as much store in the Australian government apologizing to Aboriginal people as I do in the Canadian government apologizing to native Canadians for building residential schools. The apology is meaningless unless the government stops tormenting these wounded people by other means. They haven’t and they won’t.
Correction: I shouldn’t call them “wounded people.” They are people Canada wounded. There’s a difference.
I am angry that the appalling Chuck Strahl, minister of Indian affairs, won’t build a new school for the children of Attawapiskat (their old school was contaminated by a fuel spill) despite years of their pleading to various governments. They were reduced to putting videos on YouTube. Strahl just flatly said no, even as he tells the UN how wonderful we whites are to native people. But the Liberals and the Conservatives never did give a damn about those kids; no change there then.
I went to grade school with native children bussed in from the local residential school. (We lived in the north because my father worked for the federal government.) I am haunted by memories of those kids who sat next to me in grade school who always had an inexplicable, alarmed, wide-eyed look. I didn’t know. I swear I thought those children were genuine orphans, not kidnap victims, and it shames me still.
But I see the children of the kids I knew being treated like scum in Kashechewan on James Bay, the latest being their evacuation from flooding on the reserve. Apologies mean nothing when the torment continues. Nearly 100 reserves across Canada have drinking-water advisories, CBC.ca reports, and one, the Kwicksutaineuk First Nation off the B.C. coast, only recently had a “do not drink” advisory lifted after 12 years.
Stephen Harper apologized to Maher Arar, sent for torture in Syria, because he was forced to. It seemed to cheer up Arar, which is splendid, but I don’t believe Harper’s apology was sincere. We continue to imprison Muslim Canadians on the flimsiest of pretexts; in other ways we make their lives hell. CSIS exists to do this. See, Canada isn’t really sorry.
Human dignity matters. I don’t know that it can always be restored once it has been taken away. Enough with feeble, bloodless, bureaucratic apologies. Give them folding money and let them do their best with that eternal facsimile of humanity.
I’m sorry? This piece is too bitter? Of course it is. I’m sorry, but you’ve mistaken me for a nice lady writer. I am sorry if you misunderstood my stance on these matters.
As for Canada’s Aboriginal people: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.
