As it is each year, across Canada Remembrance Day will be observed on Tuesday, November 11.
The second World War ended in 1945, 80 years ago. Most of the folks who would be old enough to remember that war as it was taking place are no longer with us, and the few that remain are in ever smaller numbers as each year passes.
As time marches on, we create more and more distance between our life today and that horrible second World War, as well as the World War before it which was supposed to have been the ‘war to end all wars’. This makes Remembrance Day ever more important, by ensuring that such impactful history is not lost on current and future generations.
My grandparents were school-aged children as World War II raged on. They were born and raised in Great Britain, which of course saw extensive damage to homes and communities due to the war. I recall reading once that some three million homes were damaged or destroyed in Great Britain during World War II. While they were just children at the time, my grandparents carried life-long memories of the sheer terror of hearing warning sirens, of seeing and hearing German planes and the bombs that they dropped. They weren’t on the front lines, but it still must have been a horrifying experience for children to endure.
Thanks to the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers and their families during the two world wars, I, the son of an immigrant mother and a father of mixed Indigenous and British ancestry, have been able to live a life feeling safe and secure here in Canada where democracy rules the day, and where diplomacy should always come before conflict, particularly armed conflict.
If you don’t learn about, appreciate, and learn from the past, you are doomed to to repeat it, which is why annual observances like Remembrance Day are so important.
At council on Monday, legion member Councillor Tony Bell said that he expects 200 troops from our local military base to attend Meaford’s ceremony at the Cenotaph on Tuesday.
Before Tuesday’s ceremony, there will be an Ecumenical Service held on Sunday, November 9, at 10 a.m, at the Meaford & St. Vincent Community Centre.
On Tuesday, November 11, Legionaires from the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 32 and veterans will gather at the Meaford & St. Vincent Community Centre before the march to the Cenotaph at Meaford Hall, which will begin at roughly 10:30 a.m., arriving at the Cenotaph for the 11 a.m. for the Remembrance Day ceremony.
Sykes Street North will be closed from Collingwood Street to Nelson Street from 10:30 a.m. to noon for the parade and ceremony.
With a military base located within the boundaries of this municipality, we are very well aware of today’s military as they shop in our stores, eat in our restaurants, and some members who live off base also live in our neighburhoods. Like many other communities where military bases are located, the military and its members become part of the fabric of the community, and we don’t ever want to have to see them sent off to armed conflicts. But we know that they are trained well, and their mission is always one of peacekeeping, not aggression. We Canadians can be rightly proud of our military who not only serve Canadians well, but the entire globe.
As I have written in Remembrance Day editorials in the past, in my opinion there are no winners in war. I think of the old saying, that war doesn’t determine who is right, only who is left.
At this point in our evolution, one would think that we would have moved past war, and found more humane ways to solve differences, but sadly, our tribal warring nature continues to lead us from one armed conflict to the next.
Fortunately I’ve never been personally touched by war. Like many in this young nation, I am the first generation of my family born in Canada. I have no friends or relatives who have served in the Canadian military, let alone seen battle, and there has never been a time in my life where I (or now my children) would have been expected to step up and go off to war, to ‘fight the good fight’.
So for me Remembrance Day is always a time to reflect upon both our past and the veterans who fought in the World Wars, two wars that took place long before I was born, as well as Canadian military members who have been sent off into war zones around the globe during my lifetime.
Remembrance Day is also a time to remind myself that war is a horrible reality being experienced by millions around the globe to this day – even as I type these words, bombs are exploding somewhere, neighbourhoods are being ripped apart by missile strikes, and as a result children in those war zones are living in sheer terror, and that truly breaks my heart.
I’m thankful that as a nation we decided decades ago that, while we can and should honour our own fallen heroes in battles of the past, we don’t glorify war, and we certainly don’t see it as an effective tool for conflict resolution – it’s a last resort, and one that we haven’t had to resort to with any notable frequency since the world wars of the 20th century.
I have long believed that the best wars are wars averted, and I suspect that this is one of the lessons that war has taught us, but as a world-wide civilization, we haven’t exactly embraced the advice.
On Remembrance Day, like many Canadians, I’ll be reflecting on Canada’s war heroes of the past, I’ll be appreciating how fortunate I am to have been born in a country where we understand the horror of war, and where we avoid it at all costs. But I will also be thinking about the millions of my fellow humans around the world who don’t have the luxury of taking the time to remember war as if it were a thing of the past.
