Forgetting

Remembrance Day used to trouble me. I was never sure whether I wanted to close my eyes and remember because remembering with too much fanfare felt like glorifying something I disagree with. I didn't know how to reconcile the importance of remembrance with the importance of the statement I wanted to make about war being wrong.

Then when I started teaching, the Remembrance Day assembly became one of my jobs to take care of, and suddenly I had to figure out how to say what I wanted to say really clearly so I could live with it, and live with the fact that I was taking a class full of kids through the process with me, and an entire school through the discoveries I made about my own feelings on war and remembrance.

Each year it became more difficult to find a veteran of World War II who was healthy enough to come and speak to a gymnasium full of children who knew nothing of war except what they learned from their Playstations. And each year I managed to find one, I listened even more carefully to what was said.

And remembrance doesn't mean we say our soldiers were heroes any more than any other country's soldiers. They were young boys who trusted and believed. And some of them got to come home and try and start a new life, and some of them never did. And we remember the tragedy of what was lost because remembering that loss of life, and that loss of innocence, is supposed to help us do better in the future.

The day that Chretien told Bush Canada would not go to Iraq was a moment in my life that I can remember being proud of my country in a way I'd never experienced. Love for my country, yes. Appreciation, yes. But pride. This was new. I felt proud.

I'm not proud of all the decisions our politicians make, or the voting public as a whole. Not proud of many of the decisions Harper has made since then about Afghanistan. And I'm not proud of myself for not being nearly as politically active or even politically aware as I should be.

But I feel that remembrance is a step forward rather than back. It's like a prayer simultaneously for the Past and for the Future.

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