Antigone

I named her Antigone.

She called for help, to her mate, to keep her children safe – she cried her sorrow into the unforgiving blue sky of daylight, a wild unbridled sound alien to the staid urban neighbourhood, a sound as ancient as anguish itself, a cry more visceral than the safety of her own life.

I shivered. I hadn't understood the words of her language at first, but I soon found a translator: he was the one who had been sent to harass her and her newborn out of their home. It wasn't their first encounter; they had played this game a year or two earlier, when her home at the time had received the green light for bulldozing for one of the city's new “developments”. She had managed to move then, but, “Where should they go this time?” I asked.
It was an honest question: the neighbourhood consensus was “NIMBY - Not-In-My-Back-Yard”, and the bulldozing and construction was taking place everywhere that wasn't already a backyard, as though one could never have enough shopping malls nearby.
“I don't know,” came the answer, the concern in his voice telling me that the callousness of the reply came from higher up.

It's a strange time to witness firsthand the anguish of displacement, especially in a place where upstanding values are consistently emphasized. Displacement is a theme at the forefront of public discussion today, perhaps most acutely in the Israel-Palestine conflict as in the Europe-Jewish conflict before it, in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and also as colonization is being viewed from the colonizeds' perspective, including here in North America where indigenous populations were brutally driven out of their traditional lands – how and to where? The conquering narrative has changed from the “Good Cowboy and Bad Indian,” to “maybe what was done to Indigenous People was not so nice” - but despite consistent wordy “treaty acknowledgements” at various public events, including at this neighbourhood's university, it's less public what, if anything is being done to learn from and coexist with the traditional life of Indigenous people. “Crown Land” is at the disposal of the crown to be bulldozed wherever and whenever the crown so wishes.

Antigone had survived the bulldozing longer than most, but this time she was in trouble: she had been attacked by a local outside his backyard and had fought back. Now when locals came too close to her, she tried to defend what she thought was her safe family-raising territory, rather than quietly moving on as the neighbourhood expected her to. It didn't matter that her ancestors had lived here long before bulldozers were even invented, long before the wonders of modern technology made the self-assured life of complacent urbanity possible. The new neighbourhood had decided that she didn't belong here, and would be tolerated only if she remained essentially invisible.

As she cried, I silently prayed for her to become invisible again, to be quiet and go underground. Her paid harasser too expressed sympathy for her, and I can't help but believe that he hoped she would find a way to move along under the cover of not ruffling too many feathers, although he had the authority to forcefully “relocate” her, or even kill her, if it should be decided thus. But a few days later, which is today, I spoke with another of the paid harassers, who said the higher authorities had issued the decision to move to step two. I still pray that she and her family will quietly move tonight under cover of darkness.

When I read about terrible inter-personal current world events, and wonder how any person can do such horrible things to any other person, I see one consistent theme: the people come to the point where they paint their enemy as “not human”. The other side speaks “gibberish”, their habits are strange, they appear menacing if looking at one the wrong way, they deserve to “die like dogs” (as though dogs don't deserve to live or die well), their existence and happiness or suffering doesn't matter because they aren't “like us”. The power we have over those whose language we choose not to understand, is that we may view them as irrelevant.
The Antigone whose cries I understood emotionally before they were explained to me, was a nuisance to the comfortable and controlled everyday of the neighbourhood, which cared less about what she said than about being confronted by her presence. A neighbourhood full of pet dogs finds it more convenient to pretend that coyotes are such a different species that they don't belong (never mind that they were here first), than to acknowledge that the two can get along and even interbreed. Letting them eat by hunting backyard mice and voles would be stealing jobs from the “pest management” company. As the parks officer told me, “It's easier to train a coyote to stay away, than to train the yahoos to manage their dogs and coexist.”

We don't yet know
   how this will all end.
I hope that those
   with nowhere to go
      may still find a way.
And that we can all look at ourselves and say,

what can I do to help?