Today is Remembrance Day. I’ve written about Remembrance Day in the past, and how important it is that we connect youth to our past, to the sacrifices made by previous generations to ensure we are free to build a society that embraces diversity, welcomes all, provides opportunity, lifts the fallen, and cherishes a healthy democracy. The further we get from the end of the great wars, the harder it is to ensure that these immense sacrifices are honoured for what they give us today—it becomes easier to take our freedom for granted, and to possibly fall back into repeating the mistakes of the past. I fear that we are already seeing the hallmarks of this forgetting in the polarized dialogue and appeal to base sentiments that we see in politics today.
While we remember those who fell in World Wars I and II especially, we also remember those who have fought in more recent wars and military action. And we should also remember that this has been the human condition for, sadly, all of our history. We have sent brave women and men to the front lines—and we have also sent naïve, innocent youth to these same battle lines in the cause of pro patria mori (this reference is to William Owen’s famous war poem, “Dulce et decorum est,” which exposed the horrors of chemical warfare). Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate for Britain, wrote the following words about sacrifice in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” a powerful poem about soldiers in 1854 who blindly and bravely followed mistaken orders to their slaughter in the Crimean War:
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
(You can read the entire poem here.)
Lest we forget.
