This Remembrance Day is different

VICTORIA - This feels like a different kind of Remembrance Day.
It has always been an important day, a time to honour ordinary men and women who suffered and died because they accepted the call of their government or their conscience. A time to remember, so it doesn’t have to happen again.
We remember teachers and accountants and farmers prepared to kill and be killed for a cause — to fight evil, or defend the helpless or just to do their duty. Their neighbours were dying. They didn’t feel right staying home.
But Remembrance Day was always a look back. It was about something we hoped was behind us. That always been part of the point - a war to end all wars.
We stood silently beside our school desks for two minutes at 11 a.m., the weight of the moment heavy enough that no one fooled around. From the moment we first consider death - say at four or five - Remembrance Day has power.
But the day was always about past, increasingly distant, sacrifices. At its centre were men and women who moved a little more slowly each year on their way to the Cenotaph, their numbers always smaller.
And in a way, that was. It meant a whole generation, now two, has been freed from the need to fight. That’s partly why it felt important to keep the memories alive. Remembering the people who had faced the horror of war reminded us all how desperately we should be working for peace.
This year everything is different. When the wreaths are laid they are not just for people who died at Dieppe, or Vimy, so long ago.
They are for people like Pte. Blake Williamson, killed last month in Afghanistan.
The numbers are still tiny. Only 42 deaths in Afghanistan. That would be a few minutes’ casualties at Passchendaele, where Canadians died by the thousands to claim a few hundred muddy yards.
But that was 90 years ago. Those men died in black and white photos. They were our great-grandfathers and beyond. We didn’t know them. We can’t comprehend their lives.
We didn’t send them there.
Even the Second World War veterans’ experiences are far removed from us. For 80 per cent of British Columbians, the war is something they read about. When this generation’s parents came home from war, they were looking ahead, not back. It was something to be put away, hard work that had to be done.
This year is different. Canadians have been in danger - and died - in missions around the world since the Second World War, including Korea.
But this is the first Remembrance Day in half a century at a time when we have sent Canadians overseas on a combat mission, with a main goal of fighting and killing an enemy. A mission that inevitably will mean that some of our troops will die and be maimed.
That changes this day. We’re not just honouring long-ago sacrifices. There are men and women - our neighbours and relatives - killing people on our behalf today, and being shot or shattered by shrapnel.
This Remembrance Day should be about those people too. We haven’t done right by them. Canada edged into a military role in Afghanistan, with little public or political debate. We’ve sent our forces into parts of Afghanistan where no other country will venture. We haven’t demanded answers about what a successful outcome will be, how long that could take and how high a price we are prepared to pay. We’re even split on whether it’s a good idea to have our forces there at all.
None of that is right. If we’re asking people to do this, we need to be a lot more careful and diligent in protecting and valuing their lives.
So this Remembrance Day, think about the men and women who died long ago, the extraordinary courage and sacrifices or ordinary people.
But remember too the people fighting right now. We owe them our attention, now and every day.
Footnote: Americans today are looking back on the Iraq war and all those deaths and wondering if things could have been different if only they had paid closer attention to what was going on, if only they had asked more questions, demanded more answers. Canadians should fear that some day, we will be wondering the same things about Afghanistan.