Our RCMP Loss.... Oh, Canada!

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It causes me to wonder -

 what if?

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With the recent events of the shooting death of three RCMP members and the wounding of two other officers in Moncton NB, there was a significant rare event that may have gone unnoticed, or maybe better stated, came and went without a true value being placed on it.

The outpouring of such national support for the officers, their families, and the RCMP as a whole was a rare case of genuine emotion. 

We have politics, social issues, wars, environmental protests, etc, that draw large groups of people in support. These always leave me with a question of their motives, and genuine belief of their positions - these other national issues, have thousands of people behind them, and I suggest thousands of motivations for their support - and I extrapolate to suggest that in most of these issues, and that support is self serving and driven by ulterior motives.

But the murder of these RCMP brought people together, and with no statistics, I can only guess many times more people than the special interest groups muster. And this mass of people was a blue moon in my life, thousands upon thousands of people - across all walks of life, offering genuine emotion and non partisan support. This emotion was not only directed to the victims of this crime, but to each other, and the community of Canada at large. 

I am not in any way minimizing the tragedy of the cause of this community closeness, as the catalyst for it was a terrible event, and hope to not be repeated. But I was affected by the resulting tearing down of social and economic walls, and our populous coming together.

It causes me to wonder - what if?

What if, again to divert attention from the cause, but focus on the result, if only once in a while we as Canadians found reason (positive) to come together like this. What we could all achieve as a single minded group of thousands, maybe millions. If just for a day - we all shared that spirit of sharing, caring, taking time from our lives to come together.

So to question - on this day, what could we as a whole accomplish? Fundraising for Cancer? Providing homes for homeless? Clean up our cities? Volunteer? - I don't know, but I do know the day of the funeral, we had a very powerful mass of population all caring about a single topic all at the same time. Unprecedented power to change whatever we would want to.

It is an unspeakable thing that happened that brought about this unprecedented sense of national community, I hope that I am not the only one that noticed that there was a positive side to this. An awe inspiring, encouraging, moment that shows that if we as a nation find good reason, we have a massive potential for improving our country as a whole.

I feel I have even more now to thank our fallen RCMP member for, not only for protecting our communities - but showing up how to be a community.