Remember, honourably

With each year, Remembrance Day grows more angst-ridden and superficial, with too much focus on the banal online messages and too little on simple silence for contemplation.

Consider something different this year. Honour the war dead with your willingness to learn, and to teach. Educate yourself, and the young members of your family who have almost certainly not been taught much about the Great War, WW II, and the Forgotten War.

Sure you could just take the short-cut instead. You can go to Facebook, change your profile picture to one of your family members who was in a war, then post a few of the endless chain-letter messages that are making the rounds. Messages that read approximately along this line: 

“Share if you honour the people who died fighting for our country. They died for our FREEDOM. I know 95% of you won’t care enough to share, but my real friends will, because they DO CARE.” 

So easy. Five minutes and you’re done. You’ve presented your ‘Look at me, I care’ facade, and even if it is empty of any real meaning, you look pretty good to so many who are doing the same thing. Not the ones who lived through those times, of course, but to your contemporaries. It’s the Facebook “Look at me”, Remembrance Day Edition.

Here’s another route you could take, though.

Your Remembrance Schedule

Spend time this week watching war documentaries and movies. Read up on the Great War, WW II, the Forgotten War, and any war or conflict in which Canadians have served. Why? Because to feel something for the people who gave their lives, you must first understand what it is they gave their lives for. And what they suffered. Don’t be the idiot politician who mades a stupid joke then explains it away by saying, “'I didn't know what Auschwitz was.”

Start looking: What was the 'Forgotten War'? What was the 'Final Solution'? What was BCATP? Why do the Dutch love Canadians so much? What is the significance of Juno Beach? Can you picture what it was like to be in the trenches during the Great War?  

If you have a surviving relative who fought in the war, visit. Or visit with an unknown veteran. Don’t do all the talking. Listen. Ask questions, but if they don’t want to answer, let it be, just be there with them. Don’t be maudlin. This modern angst we embrace is alien to the people of that era. They were the ‘just get it done’ people, not the teary ‘oh I am really super sad about all this’ people.

If you have a relative who served but who is now dead, visit the grave. Lay flowers, recite In Flanders Fields, think about the things you learned from your reading. And you really don’t need to show off on Facebook about it. Just do it.

Grab your kid, and start teaching them this endlessly fascinating history. Here’s a place to start: http://www.ducksters.com/history/world_war_ii/

Make it about remembering, not about telling people you’re remembering. There’s a difference.

Simplistic messages that say ‘they died for our freedom’? Easy. Learning something about the history of the wars? Not as easy, but infinitely more meaningful, as it honours the memory of those who fought much more than the two-second platitudinal message forwarded ad nauseum around Facebook.

So sure, go ahead and post that picture of your grandfather who fought in WW II. But please, know what the uniform meant . . . and make the words your own.

You’ve read this poem before. Please read it one more time, with feeling.

In Flanders Fields
by John McCrae 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
f ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Links

First World War

Second World War 

Forgotten War

 

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.