Blood Feuds

A couple of hockey playing boys coming to Vancouver is a lead story in local newscasts. It is surely a feel good story that everybody love—boys from different side of the religion track in Belfast become friends because of their shared love for ice hockey. To bring hope and understand to a murderous feud with our national game, what can be more Canadian than that? While we are all feeling great about ourselves, it is good to remember 1984 in Sarajevo. Sports bought the world to the haven of urbanity, civility and beauty that was known as Sarajevo. By all account it was a great time and the city was held up as example for the world when it came to ethnic peace. Just eight years later, million were dead and the city was reduced to rubble in religion/ethnic hatred. There is a reason civil wars are the most brutal of wars—you have to be close to someone to hate them so much. Blood feuds are not between people who do not know each other but between once close friends and relatives. It is good and important that these boy become friends and it is certainly a symbol of hope. It is also worth remembering that friendship, of two boys or of an entire town, is not enough, but itself, to safe us from the worst of ourselves. It takes the feuding parties to give up a part of their identity, part of themselves—the way they set themselves apart from the others. And that ain’t so easy.