During Monday’s Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph outside Meaford Hall, where hundreds had gathered to observe the ceremony, I was thinking about an editorial that I wrote back in 2016, that sadly is as relevant today as it was eight years ago.
“In many ways, it’s a charmed life here in Canada, which is why I think it is important to not only take some time on November 11 to reflect on the wars and heroes of the past, but to also reflect on the millions of people on this planet today, at this very moment, for whom war is a daily reality. From Afghanistan to Iraq, to Syria, to the Somali civil war, to the Boko Haram insurgency in Africa, millions of our fellow humans endure the violence and sorrow that accompanies war each and every day of their lives. Millions upon millions of lives have been lost in just the current ongoing conflicts around the world,” I wrote nearly a decade ago. “There is no glory in war, I don’t care what anyone says. The best wars are wars averted in my opinion, 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.”
Nearly a decade later and there isn’t less war on this planet, if anything there is more.
Globally there are dozens of armed conflicts taking place at any given time; some capture our interest when headlines show up in our news feeds, while others take place with little international notice or attention at all. International news has provided extensive coverage of the conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, or Israel and Palestine, but there are dozens more armed conflicts taking place, with tens of thousands losing lives that don’t receive the same coverage, and many are completely unheard of.
It saddens me that nearly a decade after that editorial, little has changed. Around the globe wars continue to be waged, and innocent people continue to die.
Last year on this page I asked Will We Humans Ever Evolve Beyond War? Personally, I don’t think we ever will.
As I wrote last year, “It is often said that we must learn from history in order to avoid making the same mistakes in the future, and there’s a lot of truth to that logic, but do we humans ever really learn when it comes to war? We Canadians seem to have learned the lessons of the realities of war and as a result we’ve largely stayed out of international conflicts throughout my lifetime, and I’m certainly thankful for that. Sure we’ve sent our troops to keep the peace in various hot-spots around the globe, and we’ve been dragged into a conflict or two in support of our allies, but we Canadians don’t go looking for war, and we certainly don’t glorify it.”
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’.
Without doubt, we are fortunate to live in Canada, one of the safest countries in the world, and a country in which none of us has ever had to go to bed at night worried about bombs dropping on our communities in the morning.
I respect and honour the sacrifices made by previous generations, and I respect and appreciate those who serve our country today. And I am thankful every day that the country in which I was born and have lived my life has remained safe, and protected, and has largely avoided unnecessary armed conflict after those two horrific world wars that my grandparents had to live through in their home country of England. Fortunately I have only had to read about it in history books.
