Today is National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, which marks the anniversary of the murders in 1989 of 14 young women in an event now widely known as the Montreal Massacre.

National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. It's a mouthful--the words stumble off my tongue. What the day asks of us is to re-imagine the deaths of 14 people who died because they were female and perhaps also because they were on the road to success in an historically male-dominated field. Beyond this, the official Government of Canada website tells me:

It is also an opportunity to consider the women and girls for whom violence is a daily reality, and to remember those who have died as a result of gender-based violence. And finally, it is a day on which communities can consider concrete actions to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls.

What does it mean to commemorate the day on which innocent people were killed? Not only that, but to remember all the women who've fallen under cruel hands, who've been terrorized, traumatized, and worse. Am I alone in finding all of this an intensely heavy task, necessary and, at the same time, impossible? All the women and girls who have ever suffered publically or in obscurity, behind closed doors or closed borders. How many thousands or millions are we talking? To be honest I'm afraid of the math.

At the same time we're encouraged to look forward as well as back. To reach into the future and pull out a solution to ensure December 6th never unfolds again as it did 17 years ago in Montreal.

Monique Lepine, Marc's Lepine's mother, has been a recluse since the shootings. She spoke publically for the first time this year. About Marc's father, a verbally and physically violent man who forbade any tenderness where his children were concerned. Especially from their mother, who said, "When he hit my son in the face, the marks lasted for a week." All of this before Marc Lepine was five years old.

Violence, to me, is an eruption of the unconscious. A volcanic psychic energy, tied by a thin thread to surface beliefs and attitudes, a mechanism at the root of the mind that won't be reasoned with, that has no voice of its own. It's not something I can truly understand from reading a newspaper column or by examining statistics or even from a National Day of Remembrance. I think of it like radioactive waste buried deep in the ground. It can't be undone, it won't drain away, and it contaminates everyone it touches, no matter how superficially.

But how to combat a force as unfathomable and seemingly intrinsic to the human animal as violence? It's like fist-fighting a shadow.

Never again. Fighting words. If you Google "never again" you get Rwanda, The Holocaust, 9/11. How to take action without joining the war against violence against women, which joins the war against AIDS, the war against drugs and against poverty, the war on terrorism. How to look forward without waging war?

Albert Einstein once said: "The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them." It's a famous quote that's now used a lot by corporate trainers. But I think at the time he was worried about a nuclear holocaust.

Monique Lepine remembered attending a prayer meeting on the night of the shootings 17 years ago. The gunman's identity had not yet been released. She said, "I asked to pray for the mother of that young man, without knowing it was me."

Without knowing it was me. In those few words I begin to feel sympathy for this former mother and her five-year-old boy, and I never pause to wonder if either one of them deserves it. That's the way compassion works, as far as I can tell, as an antidote for antagonism. Swiftly and belatedly and without my consent, Monique Lepine is changing my mind. There's something in this, a story's narrative intimacies--perceptible thresholds, tipping points, the power of identification.

One thing I can do as a woman who goes out at night, alone, wearing high heels and a cash-filled purse, is to remember that in Afghanistan right now there are women who never go out at all--not with escorts, not in daylight, not ever. One thing I can do as a writer is to explore, with no judgment, each side of every coin.

Consider Take Back The Night. The first march was held in Belgium in 1976. A group of women attending the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women walked arm-in-arm through the streets, holding candles to draw attention to the issue of violence against women. 30 years later, nearly everyone has heard of Take Back the Night. Candlelight marches are held in cities all over the world.

I'm not a marcher, and not (generally) a protester either. What's interesting to me about Take Back the Night is the potency of its metaphors. They were intended literally at first. Illumination in darkness. Night representing the vulnerability women everywhere often feel outdoors. A primal fear of the predatory darkness beyond the campfire, the streetlight, the crackling hearth.

The term "Take Back the Night" came from the title of a 1977 memorial read at an anti-violence rally in Pittsburg:

Women are often told to be extra careful and take precautions when going out at night. In some parts of the world, even today, women are not allowed out at night. So when women struggle for freedom, we must start at the beginning by fighting for freedom of movement, which we have not had and do not now have. We must recognize that freedom of movement is a precondition for anything else. It comes before freedom of speech in importance because without it freedom of speech cannot in fact exist.

Since its inception, the leitmotifs of Take Back the Night seem to have morphed and spread out all over the page and picked up a more complicated social meaning. Candlelight equals hope as well as power in numbers. Night has come to symbolize not only darkness but the fear of violence itself. Darkness is also isolation, a sense of helplessness in one's plight. If I look at Take Back the Night in this way I see the fundamental movement is really all about a psychological shift rather than a social one--more empowerment and less retribution, less an end of violence and more the end of fear.

It's tempting to point out that Take Back the Night doesn't actually do anything directly. It doesn't stand between husband and wife, and it doesn't prosecute anyone in court. But maybe there's something in there. As Stephen Lewis points out in his fantastic book, Race Against Time, it's often the side-door, anti-intuitive concepts that solve problems. One solution to the AIDS crisis in Africa is neither food donations nor antiretrovirals, but universal schooling for thousands of orphaned children. And just like this, the future takes shape in little overlooked ideas that toil away in the background while the world is reading the headlines. In India there is a non-profit organization called SEWA. It grants loans and banking privileges to poor, illiterate, self-employed women who otherwise would be forced to rely on their husbands and sons for the safe-keeping of their earnings. What direct effect does this have on violence against women? I'm hard-pressed to find a reliable statistic, but I bet the impact is huge.

What is the opposite of violence? I'm not precisely sure, but I think it might look something like security. What else might it look like? Another famous quote, from Mother Teresa: "I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there." Looking back while looking forward. Down, and at the same time, up. A pro-happiness-freedom-and-kindness movement. Or something pretty much like that.