Filipinos in Vancouver, Canada gathered over the weekend as dusk settled, anticipating a familiar warmth — the rekindling of ancestral pride in battles won, in the enduring spirit of a people who once defied a conquistador. They came seeking a fleeting but vital joy: the strength found in shared heritage. Then, the sound shattered the evening: a violent roar of tires on asphalt, the sickening crunch of bone under steel, followed by an unnerving silence.

Eleven lives extinguished in a brutal instant — mothers, fathers, children, friends — by a black Audi and a driver whose mind, police say, had long fractured. Authorities have hesitated to call it terrorism, as if terror is solely defined by ideology and not by the horrifying reality of bodies strewn across a street still littered with celebratory confetti and broken flags.

They claim it wasn’t political, as if the neglect of mental illness, the tolerance of unchecked violence, and the decay of care systems — not just in the Philippines, but in Canada, too — are somehow not political failures.

Kai-Ji Adam Lo, 30 years old. Known to the police, known to mental health professionals, yet tragically unknown to those he crushed. No manifesto, no grand cause, just the apparent descent of a man with nowhere left to go but into the lives of others with lethal force.

Lo has been charged with multiple murders, and rightly so. We cannot allow insanity to be casually claimed as a shield against responsibility for so deliberate and devastating an act. The Canadian Prime Minister offered flowers, his eyes reflecting sorrow. The President of a distant homeland, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., offered words of grief. Newspapers mourned in their headlines.

There is a particular cruelty in how it unfolded — in the soft glow of evening streetlights, during a festival honoring Lapu Lapu, a warrior who fought for his people’s freedom. He struck down Magellan and triumphed. The festivalgoers were struck down by an unseen force, not a sword but a steering wheel, not a charge for glory but a crash of mindless destruction.

We once believed in the safety of certain spaces: parades, schools, churches, markets, and festivals under the stars. We once believed madness was a rare anomaly. Now we know better.

Now madness feels like the very ground beneath us. There will be calls for change — more mental health funding, better background checks, improved outreach. There will be candlelight vigils, there will be promises, and then, the slow, inevitable forgetting.

Until the next night, the next gathering, the next roar in the dark.

It was meant to be a simple evening, a simple affirmation of heroic ancestry, of a spirit that refuses to yield: a reminder that joy itself can be an act of defiance. Instead, it became another stark reminder of our fragility. How easily life, hope and celebration can be shattered by the weight of neglect and the cracks in our care.

They will clean the streets, bury the dead, and hang next year’s festival posters with a few more security guards posted at the corners. But for the families who lost their light, for the children who witnessed horror, and for the survivors who’d wake screaming into the dark, there will be no easy cleaning, no fixing, no forgetting.

The lights went out on Fraser Street that night. And something within us dimmed as well.