Joe McWilliams
Wars are complicated, and the reasons for them, their justification and so on, are open to debate. As they should be.
Some wars are just and others definitely aren’t. Some could have and should have been avoided.
The thing that isn’t ambiguous at all – or shouldn’t be – is the honour of serving one’s country. There may be as many motives as there are people who do it.
But it’s probably safe to say that in general the urge to serve is honourable and worthy of the kind of recognition that Remembrance Day attempts to provide. Canada is better off as a result of this spirit of service.
Many, of course, paid the ultimate price and Remembrance Day particularly honours them. I don’t know why it’s so often repeated that these young men and women went off to fight for our freedom. Canada’s freedom was hardly in jeopardy, in any war I can think of. Many of them were fighting to keep the Mother Country (i.e. the U.K.) free from invasion. They may have been inspired to fight against an obvious evil (Naziism). They may have sought military glory. They might have been keen for adventure.
Whatever it was, they put their lives on the line and many didn’t come home. Others did, maimed physically and broken psychologically. It is their sacrifice we honour on Nov. 11.
We certainly aren’t honouring war itself. Or any particular conflict. Or militarism. We remember what war costs, and if we have any sense at all, we do what we can to see that it doesn’t happen again.
Moving on to more trivial matters, one thing to avoid, when writing pieces like this one, is the cliché expression. We get paid money, after all, to stimulate people’s imagination, not be boring.
That’s one way of looking at it. Another could be that since many people feel reassured, or comforted, by familiar things, this could apply to words in a newspaper column. The tried and true. The old standards.
“It’s that time of year again,” is one of those. Or this one, heard and seen over and over in advertising: “Cold weather will soon be here, so don’t forget to …. etc. etc. etc.”
So it is very common – perhaps even expected – to see opinion columns, editorials and so on in early November, saying the same things that are said every year. Some people might like it that way. It’s predictable. Ceremony is supposed to be predictable.
One risk of that is when things get too familiar, it’s easy to zone out and not pay attention. Ho hum, heard that a thousand times before! Where’s something more interesting?
Usually, the answer to that question lies where creative people are doing things that haven’t been done before, or writing stories in ways that haven’t been done. Or expressing old ideas in new ways, looking at things from unusual angles.
That’s where the really cool stuff is going on!
What any of that has to do with steeped in tradition ceremonies such as Remembrance Day is a good question. Maybe they don’t even belong in the same conversation. But what got me going on this theme was the idea that the same old, same old words maybe aren’t good enough. Readers deserve something fresh, even if it’s just a slightly different way of looking at remembrance.
But at times there are no words; such as during that moment of silence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.