My Take | In a pandemic, compassion begins with understanding
- Disasters have a way of exposing a country’s weaknesses and strengths, both of which need to be accounted for to arrive at an objective and fair assessment
Someone emailed me a photo of an installation artwork at the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, one of Canada’s premier art institutions.
It was placed in a hallway and it said: “You f***ing Chinese people bring the virus to Canada.” It quickly generated a social media storm and many members of the local Chinese community were incensed.
However, the school’s management defended the art piece, which was produced as part of an undergraduate assignment. Far from promoting racial hatred and prejudice, it said the student was trying to raise awareness.
I take the institute’s word for it. It is, after all, one of the most progressive schools in a country famous for being liberal, tolerant and multiracial. Then again, even if that was the intention, it might be hard for people to tell in these sensitive times.
But, whatever its intention, it does raise a key point about this novel coronavirus pandemic: it has brought out the worst among us. When compassion is most called for, it is least in evidence.
I myself am guilty. I was ready to turn this column gleefully into one about the bungled response of the Trump administration to the pandemic, much in the manner of many anti-China pundits, in Hong Kong and overseas, who have written about the Chinese suffering with barely disguised sadism and schadenfreude.