{"id":29371,"date":"2019-11-11T11:26:47","date_gmt":"2019-11-11T16:26:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bgccan.com\/?p=29371"},"modified":"2019-11-11T11:26:47","modified_gmt":"2019-11-11T16:26:47","slug":"remembering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bgccan.com\/en\/remembering\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering"},"content":{"rendered":"[et_pb_section bb_built=&#8221;1&#8243;][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=&#8221;4_4&#8243;][et_pb_text _builder_version=&#8221;3.19.3&#8243;]\n<p>Today is Remembrance Day.\u00a0I\u2019ve written about Remembrance Day <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bgccan.com\/en\/lest-we-forget\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in the past<\/a>, 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.\u00a0The 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\u2014it becomes easier to take our freedom for granted, and to possibly fall back into repeating the mistakes of the past.\u00a0I 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0And we should also remember that this has been the human condition for, sadly, all of our history.\u00a0We have sent brave women and men to the front lines\u2014and we have also sent na\u00efve, innocent youth to these same battle lines in the cause of pro patria mori (this reference is to William Owen\u2019s famous war poem, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poems\/46560\/dulce-et-decorum-est\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" class=\"broken_link\">Dulce et decorum est<\/a>,\u201d which exposed the horrors of chemical warfare).\u00a0Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate for Britain, wrote the following words about sacrifice in \u201cThe Charge of the Light Brigade,\u201d a powerful poem about soldiers in 1854 who blindly and bravely followed mistaken orders to their slaughter in the Crimean War: \u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em>Not though the soldier knew<br \/><\/em><em>Someone had blundered.<br \/><\/em><em>Theirs not to make reply,<br \/><\/em><em>Theirs not to reason why,<br \/><\/em><em>Theirs but to do and die.<br \/><\/em><em>Into the valley of Death<br \/><\/em><em>Rode the six hundred.<\/p>\n<p><\/em>(You can read the entire poem <a href=\"https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poems\/45319\/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" class=\"broken_link\">here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>Lest we forget.<\/p>\n[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today is Remembrance Day.\u00a0I\u2019ve written about&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[278,473,354,353],"class_list":["post-29371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ceo-blog","tag-ceo","tag-lest-we-forget","tag-november-11","tag-remembrance-day"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bgccan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bgccan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bgccan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bgccan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bgccan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bgccan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bgccan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bgccan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bgccan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bgccan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}