Once a year there is one day set aside that does not derive from a particular religious perspective such as Christmas, nor from a particular social outlook such as Labour Day, nor from any organized commercial celebration such as Mothers’ Day.
There is one day in which every Canadian is bound to his fellow citizens through an unbounded debt for an unbounded gift.
Remembrance Day should be our acknowledgment that the price of our freedom was the blood and sacrifice of those who came before us. The cost of freedom is carried today by those men and women who put on the uniform and by their actions proclaim to the world, “To get to them you must go through me.”
We are the “them” they defend. It is our values they risk life and limb and sanity itself to protect.
Whatever your religion, men and women died to ensure you could practice it without the darkness of tyranny. Whatever your politics, others poured out their blood to guarantee you your right to preach it without compulsion or torture. Whatever your way of life, others paid the price to ensure you could enjoy it.
There is not a person in this country that should not take seriously the nature of this debt. The fascists did not lose World War II by accident. The cost was enormous. The Soviet tyranny did not end because the tyrants went to a confessional one day and said “gee, we were wrong, let’s change our ways.” From the Korean War through the Serbian genocides, Canadians in uniform turned over their lives to the cause of freedom and helped bring down the Berlin Wall.
Today when young Canadians fall in Afghanistan, or die in a chopper trying to save people stranded at sea, they are doing so for our values, our freedom, our security and ultimately our lives.
Try to get the enormity of that. These men and women serve a regimented life, giving up their freedom to preserve ours. Facing dangerous enemies, they sacrifice their security so that we may be safe. They put at risk their lives so that others may live. Who among us has the character and courage to do the same? Wearing the poppy then is simply a matter of acknowledging a debt that can never be settled, a mortgage on our freedom with an infinite amortization.
Remembrance is the one thing that transcends all political partisanship, religious belief, race, gender, lifestyle, social status – transcends it all.
All Canadians are bound by this debt of blood and bone.
Wearing the poppy is a symbolic act that says we recognize the price of our lives and freedom, and that price has been the life, limb and minds of thousands of men and women who courageously placed their bodies between us and the tyrants. And the tyrants did try to get through them, littering the wide world with the bodies of Canada’s sons and daughters.
The poppy therefore really is your price tag. No poppy; you’re worthless.
Failing to take the opportunity to contemplate the heroes that have given everything so that we may have so much is a failure of character and a mark of shameful ingratitude. Of course part of their sacrifice was to ensure that no one can be compelled to wear a poppy or do any other thing that is a matter of conscience. That makes it no less shameful.
Some have said they have religious reasons for not wearing a poppy and if so, so be it. But I find it passing strange that it can be an offense against religion to simply acknowledge those who have actually made the practice of that belief possible. A Quaker once told me that his rationale for wearing a poppy was that he was not embracing or encouraging war but that as a pacifist he could mourn the loss of others and honour their purpose. Can we do any less?