Another Remembrance Day - No Change in the Number of Wars Happening Today

I was up early this morning - had breakfast, brushed my teeth, made my bed and by just before 8:00 AM, I turned on my computer and watched CBC's coverage of the Remembrance Day ceremonies in Ottawa. It is always strange watching the ceremony so early in the morning. However, it feels somehow more significant that I do that than wander down to watch to a local ceremony in my now hometown of Duncan.

I have participated and watched a lot of such services. As a cub and then as a scout I marched in parades and church services honouring the soldiers who had gone overseas to fight for their country (which was Britain for the most part) in both the first and second world wars. My mother's father had been in France and may have suffered lung damage from gas attacks, there was a great aunt who my mother said was deaf from being too close to the artillery guns (she was a nurse in the front lines of WW1) and my father, who we all believed suffered his terrible migraine attacks at least in part because of a war caused head injury, had spent four years overseas during WW2. The depression and then the war (which separated my not-yet-married parents for those years) was part of the subtext of almost all of our dining room table conversations. It was not surprising that for most of my young life, probably well into my late teens - Remembrance Day was a significant day.

It is less so now and I suspect for the generations behind me - any significance will be manufactured by groups and institutions that have a vested interested in maintaining it. There are, of course, no remaining survivors of WW1 and relatively few from WW2. Canada was less involved in the Korean war and while the country has maintained some sort of presence in other conflicts, the number of Canadian soldiers who have actually participated outside of Canada is relatively few. In fact, almost as many Newfoundlanders were killed within a few months of each other in WW1 as have been killed in all of the conflicts since 1946.

I got a ride from a veteran this past summer. He spent a portion of our time together talking about veteran's rights, the poor care the government has offered them and some of his work volunteering with agencies that support veterans. He was, of course, absolutely right - Canada had not done all that it could have done to help soldiers re-adjust to civilian life. It never has. I am sure that my family was unique as we, on occasion, (in hindsight) experienced some of the consequences of my father's PSTD. But then my driver said that he had served all of his time in Germany and that he had had a good time. There is a whole generation of ex-soldiers whose experiences in the Canadian Armed service were radically different than my grandfather's, my father's or those who served in places such as Afghanistan. I am not sure if those peacetime soldiers will ever be able to generate the powerful emotions that seeing veterans from WW1 or WW2 did.

And I am not sure if we need to have those emotions artificially generated. War is a terrible thing. It destroys people's lives, it can destroy a whole generation's worth of dreams and aspirations. But all of the parades and ceremonies, all of the trips to old battlefields and tours of cemeteries overseas have not stopped one death from a gun, have not prevented one child from losing a parent due to a conflict that was never needed. A conflict that could have been prevented if the politicians and the people had wanted to stop it. Yes, we will remember. But I would much rather remember the stupidity and the ignorance that caused those wars, that caused those deaths, those lost dreams. I would much rather spend our collective energies stopping it from happening again and again.