Ed O’Brien has died. He will be missed.
I first met Ed some forty odd years ago, when I was an eager beaver teenager, anxious to change the world. It was during World War II, and the Great Depression was scarcely beginning to peter out as the country was being launched on an unprecedented career of industrialization. Those of us who lived through those exciting years may remember that the need for changing the world was like a collective inebriation to us in those years, in which we passionately sought for ways and means to bring about a postwar world in which social justice and wholesome family life might have a chance, a world of peace and freedom for all.
A man of conviction
As a committed Catholic, I gravitated toward the Social Forum Group, which published a monthly tabloid, The Social Forum, dedicated to “the clarification of social thought” largely from the standpoint of the Christian democratic center). At the time it was edited by the late John Vincent Fulton, and it was in his office one Saturday afternoon that I first met Ed O’Brien, back in town on one of his periodic visits.
Our paths diverged in the following years, and it wasn’t until some twenty years later, when I returned to Toronto from Montreal, that I really got to know Ed.
A man of passionate conviction, stubborn, single-minded and a dedicated foe of hypocrisy, Ed was a combination of Don Quixote, Cyrano de Bergerac, and an irascible old Irishman. He could talk your hind leg off, a complaint I understand was often made by those who came into contact with St. Catherine of Sienna. He suffered all the frustration of the proverbial Spaniard, who wants the world healed of all its wounds, and wants it done by five o’clock.
Often he had a way of making his points in an exaggerated, highly emphatic manner, which often resulted in people reacting negatively to his rhetoric. Those of us who knew him, of course, realized that this was because he was so desperately anxious to communicate something of his own sense of crucial urgency re the many situations of injustice and cant that he perceived as defiling the human condition in our time: He was a “baggy-pants prophet” and agitator in a culture which esteems neither. The complacency and apathy he encountered only spurred him to even more energetic tilting at the windmills of passivity he encountered on every side.
Back in the 60s, he and Mrs. O’Brien launched The Magna Carat Committee to alert us to the awful consequences of the Trudeau Omnibus Bill of amendments to the Criminal Code, the chief among them being the legalization of abortion. This went over like a lead balloon, as far as the public response was concerned (when have prophets been popular in their lifetime?). He then became one of the founding members of the original Committee for the Defence of Unborn Children, which was also fated to evaporate in a prolonged blast of public indifference. To the day of his death, he never stopped opposing abortion, and I am sure that his spirit will hover over every anti-abortion demonstration and picket action in this country until the Herodian horror is exorcised.
He was an avid letter writer, writing to harried public officials, editors and publicists, often not without eloquence and poignancy. He was also a great talker, and I have spent long hours yawning into my telephone while being brought up to date on the O’Brien wars. He also did an enormous amount of personal “research” getting to the bottom of situations, he had a considerable knack for motivating others to research and action.
He instructed
Come to think of it, he was a man of quite a few “knacks,” like that of penetrating to the heart of the matter with a blunt and swift precision which we sometimes found disconcerting, but more often than not, he was right, and we were instructed. He could be a pain the derriere to the smug and the indifferent, but he also knew how to stimulate and inspire the merely passive and torpid. He also had a happy faculty of bringing people into contact with one another, people who shared common interests and enthusiasms.
Sometimes dismissed as a crackpot, he had a lot of critics, but he made enduring friendships as well, and more, the man was a catalyst for friendship among others. He was never afraid to swim against the tide, to march to his own drummer, nor cowardly in the face of adversity, and I think these are qualities associated with heroes, in an age when moral and civic courage are at a low ebb, he will be missed.
I am glad to have known him for a friend, and I will miss him sorely.
