What Do You Celebrate on Canada Day After the Flood?

I stole this from a Dave Rutherford tweet, but am pretty sure it's going viral, so that should be okay. 

On 11 September 2001, we were told by those who could remember days of similar impact—Hiroshima, Kennedy’s assassination—that there are days we remember every detail of. Forever after, we tell people where we were when, what we were doing when, how we heard that. We define our life by before that day and after it.

                Forever our days are the pre and the post.

                For many in Canmore and High River, those days will be the days before and the days after Thursday, 20 June 2013. A day later for the people of Calgary and Siksika Nation. Over the course of the weekend, breath was held and then released in Red Deer, Drumheller, Medicine Hat. After the devastation upriver, their fear was understandable.

                June 20 and 21, and the days which followed. The longest days of the year twice over in 2013.

                This is my tenth year in my adopted province. Twice in that ten years Southern Alberta has been ravaged by floods, though 2005 is only a memory now. The Flood of the Century forgotten in less than a decade. I have come to love Alberta, and am proud and delighted to live where I do.

                On this day where we celebrate the nation we live in, if you’re like me you’re feeling, perhaps, a little guilty to be celebrating anything while others toil in in homes that, unlike your own, are not dry or safe or perhaps even standing. How can we celebrate anything, especially something as vague as our national identity when people are shovelling sewage out of their basements rather than looking aloft at fireworks?

                I won’t remind you of the savagery of Mother Nature. I won’t add my voice to the chorus of “This too shall pass.” Instead I will encourage you to celebrate things that are very worthy of it, as an Albertan, as a Canadian, as a human being. I will remind you of the good.

                Of the grinning firefighter carrying the little old lady through knee-deep water.

                Of the volunteers who keep coming, long past the expectation, to work in their neighbors’ devastated homes.

                Of Edmonton military, police, firefighters, rushing down the QE2 to come to the aid of their beleaguered sister city.

                Of the people who opened their homes to complete strangers needing a place to stay.

                Of students and teachers from Strathmore who, a day away from summer break, went to Siksika to help the stricken.

                Of the people who donated clothing, food, or time to those who lost a little or lost it all.

                Of the people who said, over and over, “At least we’re alive. Stuff can be replaced.”

                On this Canada Day I’m proud of us. As we march further into the days that came after, we need to remember this unity, this good. The clean-up and rebuilding will be long and difficult, and possibly more demanding than the initial shock of tragedy.

                We have two lives now, the one before and the one after. What we need to remember is the unity we saw at the point where our days became divided. Where we stood as one and we held a mud-streaked hand out to a brother or a sister.

                I love you today, Southern Alberta, for I have seen us all stand as one.