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I Salute Our Veterans

The Eleventh Hour Of The Eleventh Day Of The Eleventh Month

Rememberance Day

If you were 17 at the beginning of the Second World War, you are now more than 70 years old.
It is a fact of life that many people for whom the world wars were a lived reality have died, and the day is coming when they will all be gone.
What effect will their passing have on our collective moral conscience? Does the death of the last Holocaust survivor make another holocaust more likely?
As a nation and as a culture, we already marginalize the elderly. In so doing, we lose the value of their wisdom and experience. We do so at our peril. In an age marked by tightly-controlled war journalism, high-tech battles and morally confusing regional conflicts, war seems distant. It only happens to other people.
Remembrance Day used to be a national holiday, an entire day of reflection for Canadians directly affected by two world wars. Today, we wear poppies. But how many of us actually stop, even for a brief moment, to remember? How many visit war memorials?
When events that shake the whole world become distant, is it just the natural movement of history? Increasingly, few of us have first-hand experience of the world wars, and while we still honour a moment of silence, it's quite possible that many of us leave it mentally and emotionally unexplored: misty and ceremonial, but not of our time.
That a madman rose to power in one nation, and subsequently threatened the freedom of the entire world, seems more like a film plot than a real-life horror of less than a lifetime ago. It isn't indifference or a moral breakdown; it might be the failure of empathy.
Most of us who are young and fortunate enough not to have experienced a world war know that these events took place. We can study the historical details and read personal accounts.
But it is more difficult to feel their reality. Remember: If you were 17 at the beginning of the Second World War, you had a good chance of going to a foreign country to die, or of losing friends and family. As powerful as the histories, art and drama that document the world wars may be, they don't replace lived experience.
To feel the significance of Remembrance Day emotionally is to keep alive a vital sense of the folly and tragedy of war. But to do so requires more than bowing our heads at the eleventh hour. It requires a concerted effort to truly remember the pain and sacrifice of so many men, women and children. To engage oneself emotionally requires imagination and the desire to use it. We need an open heart and a willingness to actively remember.

Lest we forget.

-- Geoffrey Hays

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