About the ease of naming evil and the work of looking deeper

They say small towns are families.

I grew up in one. The kind where people knew who your parents were and the corner store grocery store cashier knew your name. The kind where doors were rarely locked and casseroles appeared on porches before the police did. The kind where belonging feels warm and watchful. So when the mayor of Tumbler Ridge, B.C. said that on the news, I understood what he ment.

I also know something else about small towns. They run like a current, and it’s hard to be anyone going against that current. It’s hard to be anyone who stands out in that current.

When I was twelve, I was already taller than my mother. Women at church commented on it as if it were a personality flaw. Grown men made comments I didn’t yet understand. Strangers spoke to me as if I were older than I was, as if my height had made me fair game for adult expectations. In a small town, your body is public property. Your difference is communal conversation.

Families in tight-knit communities also notice when you don’t bow your head during prayer. When I told my mother I could no longer attend church because I didn’t believe in God, I expected disappointment. I did not expect fury. The words she used that day rearranged something inside me. Love, I learned, could have conditions and still call itself love. Belonging could be revoked without warning.

I remember the first time I realized there were feelings I had, parts of me, that went against my little towns current. I had a crush on a girl in my middle school class, a longing to kiss her. I didn’t have language for it then. I only had instinct, that instinct told me this was not information to share or something I could act on. I didn’t dislike boys, but its a side of me I couldn’t explore until I was able to leave that small town. But even at 13 I understood that whatever current this was, it would complicate things. So I swallowed it.

Survival in a small town is often quiet. It looks like smiling. It looks like nodding along. It looks like editing yourself in real time.

I am also sadly intimately familiar with gun culture and gun violence.

My partner and I lived in Austin, Texas for almost two decades. After we married we bought a small house on a street in the sleepy southern part of town. One day a family down the street was killed. I had known them for fourteen years. I had sat beside the father at HOA meetings, arguing about landscaping and dues. We had been neighbours in the most ordinary way. Afterward, there were murdered police officers and police tape and the kind of silence that doesn’t lift. The father survived by a fluke of being out of town that weekend. The rest of his family did not.

Gun violence is a rapid devastation wrapped in a ricochet of terror. It is the kind of loss that echoes for years.

It also drives vigilance. Before leaving Texas, in grocery stores, I would clock the exits. I’d notice hands. Waistbands. The pitch of someone’s frustration at the self-checkout. I measured how friendly to be with strangers. I calculated. I told myself it was prudence. I know now it was something else too, a nervous system that learned how quickly the ordinary can rupture.

I am also a parent.

I miscarried babies I still think about. Loss, even early, changes the architecture of your heart. I have stood in doorways at night just to watch my children breathe. Memorized the weight of their tiny bodies against my chest. There is no preparing for the possibility that a morning hug could be the last one. I do not care if a child is two or twelve or thirty or fifty. When I read about parents identifying their children after violence, something inside me recoils so hard it feels physical.

I am also raising a trans child.

There is a sweatshirt they love, soft from too many washes. A way their hair falls onto their face when they are thinking. Silly moments at the dinner table. Half-finished art projects in their room. They are not an ideology. They are not a headline. They are a person becoming themselves in real time.

After the shooting this week in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., the comments came quickly. The explanations came faster. Identity became motive. Motive became indictment. I felt something old tighten in my chest.

I know this move.

Take one difference. Make it the reason. Call it the problem.

I do not know the full story of the girl who pulled the trigger. I do not know what she carried or what she endured or what went untreated or unseen. I know only what it feels like to grow up in a place that prides itself on being family and still feel the need to fold yourself smaller. I know what it is to calculate which truths are safe.

“Hurt people, hurt people” is something we say to make sense of the senseless. But hurt does not form in a vacuum. Communities shape it. Silence shapes it. Ridicule shapes it. Easy access to weapons shapes it.

We are quick to name evil. It gives us something solid to stand on. It separates us cleanly: them from us, monster from town, sickness from innocence. Naming evil feels decisive.

We are slower to acknowledge the soil it grew in. Who in our communities feels seen only when they conform? Who learns early to edit themselves for safety? Who sits at a kitchen table deciding which truth will cost too much? When we say we are family, who hears warmth, and who hears a warning?

This week I have thought a lot about casseroles and church pews and the comfort of being known. I thought about the children who leave quietly, and the ones who stay and harden, and the ones who never find a place to set down their vigilance.

I’ve thought about my own child, becoming themselves in a country where people debate whether children like them are a threat.

Places help mold people. Communities are not bystanders to the lives formed inside them. The messages we repeat, the differences we spotlight, the silences we keep. When someone with untreated mental health struggles and easy access to a gun commits violence, we rush to name evil. The word is clean. Decisive. It gives us absolutes in a world that feels unsteady. It allows us to draw a hard border between us and them.

We allow it to absolve us.

If the problem is simply evil, then we do not have to examine any harder at what helped to form the person. We do not have to ask who was isolated, who was ridiculed, who was reduced to a single trait and told that trait was the most important thing about them. We do not have to question our own fear of what is different.

And we do this again and again. We take the difference; gender identity, religious belief, disability, sexuality, mental health diagnosis, and hold it up as explanation. We treat it as motive. We tell ourselves the rupture came from that difference, not from the way we respond to it.

It is easier to fear what we do not know than to sit across from someone and discover how much we share. It is easier to blame than to build relationships. But communities that refuse to know one another, that fixate on difference and ignore shared humanity, create isolation. And isolation is fertile ground for despair.

This is not about excusing harm. Accountability matters. Grief matters. Safety matters. But so does honesty.

If we as communities are going to call ourselves family, then we have to be willing to ask what we are cultivating together, whether we are nurturing belonging, or merely demanding conformity at all cost.

Because what grows in a community does not grow there by accident.