In Wednesday’s NP Platformed, Colby Cosh reports on a shocking incident in Dunnville, Ontario where a Catholic priest discovered and threw away some shoes that had been deposited on a bench in front of his church. This ***obviously*** was some sort of hate crime by the priest personally and the entire hierarchy of the Catholic church collectively all the way up to the Pope which must now be tearfully acknowledged and repented of in multiple media appearances, because the items were part of an informal, unofficial memorial to the long-deceased children whose unmarked graves were discovered at a former residential school in British Columbia.
Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
Ne Hiyawak seemingly didn’t ask permission to leave the shoes at the church, or give the pastor any notice; the next day, when others seeking to do the same thing explained what they were up to, the priest allowed an enormous pile of stuffed animals and handmade signs to be created on the front steps of the building.
A natural next question may be whether these mementoes will be allowed to obstruct the church door forever. Can it be that these items, too, are certain to end up in the garbage after sitting around amid the elements for a few days? (If you want to recycle an old stuffed animal and thereby guarantee that it finds its way into the hands of a child, actually finding such a child yourself is the only appropriate procedure.)
NP Platformed would like to suggest very gently that temporary “memorials” constructed by leaving stuff on common property, or on someone else’s property, should be discouraged by the press rather than encouraged. We have all driven past a mildewed or long-rotted bundle of plastic-wrapped flowers lying in a ditch or on a corner where someone died: this has somehow become the last acceptable form of littering, a vice our civilization once embraced, and had to work hard to mitigate.
Eventually, someone or other, probably a custodial professional paid peanuts, has to pick all that stuff up. We’re not sure how this isn’t obvious, or why it ought to be controversial. If you want to festoon a church with protest materials, and you do this precisely because you have a well-founded disrespect for the church, we are not sure anyone can justly complain when the materials are removed.
The Catholic Church may be monstrous, but the creation of memorials consisting of piles of items like shoes puts its stewards in an impossible position. If you remove the items too soon, you’re being disrespectful. If you leave them lying around long enough to become an eyesore, that’s surely no less disrespectful. There is a stubborn segment of the public that cannot resist this sociopathic behaviour, but it should be observed that in publicizing these stunning and brave makeshift memorials, the news media always photograph them at their very nicest (which is never all that nice) and walk away. Those who have to collect the detritus are never asked their opinion, nor are those unfortunates who merely live nearby.
