(no subject)
So it's Remembrance Day - a day to remember all the naive kids who went off to the meat-grinder of two World Wars, without any real idea what they were getting into.
In the US, it's a shopping holiday. In Canada, it's a solemn event. We wear poppies and gather at cenotaphs to remember the dead, and talk about trenches and No Man's Land fenced off with barbed wire, and a generation of kids whose fathers didn't come home. Increasingly we talk about the things in World War II that can't be forgotten either - Nazism and the Holocaust first and foremost.
True remembrance can only serve the cause of peace. Maybe that's why this country was so committed in those two wars, and so reluctant since to go to war - maybe this yearly ceremony is part of that reluctance.
This year I'm thinking especially of the gay veterans never compensated for what they went through, in two World Wars. I hope the apology I proposed goes somewhere, but it seems every reporter wants to talk to a World War II vet over this, and it's too late for most of the victims in that war.
The apology should still come, though, while there's still a few around to hear it.
In the US, it's a shopping holiday. In Canada, it's a solemn event. We wear poppies and gather at cenotaphs to remember the dead, and talk about trenches and No Man's Land fenced off with barbed wire, and a generation of kids whose fathers didn't come home. Increasingly we talk about the things in World War II that can't be forgotten either - Nazism and the Holocaust first and foremost.
True remembrance can only serve the cause of peace. Maybe that's why this country was so committed in those two wars, and so reluctant since to go to war - maybe this yearly ceremony is part of that reluctance.
This year I'm thinking especially of the gay veterans never compensated for what they went through, in two World Wars. I hope the apology I proposed goes somewhere, but it seems every reporter wants to talk to a World War II vet over this, and it's too late for most of the victims in that war.
The apology should still come, though, while there's still a few around to hear it.