Re: Remembrance Day
That time of year again... Honestly, given the problems happening in the Middle-East, between Russia and the rest of the world, between China and the rest of the world, and between the USA and the rest of the world, I wonder if we actually have forgotten...
"Lest we forget" and all...
I'm delivering newspapers right now (well, not as of this writing), and on the Globe and Mail's front page today were just the words "Lest we forget" on a white void. I had some Globes on my dash as I was driving around, and those words were reflected back to me in the windshield and kinda got stuck in my head. When I got home, first thing I did was to look up the definition of "Lest". It indicates an intention to prevent something or to avoid the risk of something. But what is it that we're trying to prevent from being forgotten?
Our dead soldiers? Sure. They fought and died for their country, whichever country that may be. We only tend to remember the soldiers who fell in defense of our own nation, however. What about the soldiers who fought for what were once our enemies? Was their loss any less significant to their families? Sure they may have been on the losing side (or not, we tend to forget our failures much more easily), but who's to say it was the wrong side?
I don't know about elsewhere in the world quite as much, but here in Canada, it seems like there's been a growing glorification of our military. I hear talk about how Canada was born out of the War of 1812, or was defined in the First World War, or about our contributions during the Second. Then, of course, there was the conflict in Afghanistan.
The other newspaper I deliver, the Chronicle Herald, the local paper (which ran a rather poignant editorial cartoon after the Ottawa shootings last month which you can see
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) has been running a series of pieces under a banner of "The Great War", which refers to the First World War. The only great thing about that, was the great loss of life. It was a messy, ugly war which, in its resolution, opened the doors to the atrocities that lead up to the second World War. Yah, let's be proud of that.
Of course, there's other things to be proud of too, or rather, things we should express the intention to not forget as well. We're literally raping our land up here. There's the oil sands, of course, then there's the oil and gas exploration going on in the northern part of our country. Shale gas over here in the east. Pipelines being built in a spiderweb across the continent. Then there's our government's reprehensible actions in international climate talks. Really makes one proud to wear the maple leaf.
I mentioned rape before, how about in a more human-to-human context? A rather high profile public broadcaster was recently fired after he was accused by several women (I've lost count of how many) of assaulting them. Two members of parliament were suspended over allegations of "personal misconduct" from two female MPs. And we certainly don't have a societal issue that causes aboriginal women to have drastically higher chances of going missing or being murdered. At least, that's according to our Prime Minister, the
Right and
Honourable Stephen Harper.
Really, I'm not sure how proud I should be of being Canadian right now. There's good people here! Really! Just like there's good people everywhere. Yet, on the large scale we go and take a dump on them. It's not a Canadian thing though, happens all over the world. I guess I should say I'm not sure how proud I should be of even being Human right now. We can be so much better than we are, but we're sliding backwards. Prioritizing short-term gains over long-term survival, national glory over international cooperation, dogmatic extremism over rational discussion.
Lest we forget,
Or we'll never remember again.