Link to the best Remembrance Day strips from “For Better or For Worse”
The CanaDoper Café (2012 edition of The great, ongoing Canadian current events and politics thread.)
Thanks.
I participated in a Facebook Remembrance Day event this year. The Ottawa Citizen and Canada.com have an archive for all the Canadian Forces members killed in Afghanistan since 2002. Canada’s Fallen in Afghanistan. The idea is to commemorate one of our more recent losses. The person I found was Private Lane Watkins, originally from Winnipeg. I found it incredibly moving, the fact that he was only 20 years old when he died in 2007, making him easily young enough to have been my son.
Then my daughter and I went to church where there was an extremely moving service. (We have joined up with a church choir this year. Long story made short - although I am now an atheist, I grew up in an extremely musical church. I owe much of my development as a signer/musician to my church choir experiences. My 13-year-old daughter is, if anything, more musically/dramatically inclined than her old man, so off to choir we go, twice a week.)
There were readings from Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, a World War I Chaplain’s reminiscences, a World War II nurse’s memoirs, notes from the Korean War, and a letter a boy wrote to his mother in May of 1944, to be delivered to her in the event of his death. The service found an ideal balance between expressing gratitude for peace and fully describing the nature of the sacrifice that many had made on our behalf.
I was struck this morning that the thoughts raised are so complex and contradictory that a respectful silence is actually the most eloquent response possible.
I spend much of yesterday poking through family records. My grandfather’s Gazette entry and his dispatch can (he survived WWI Palestine as a Lieutenant – he did not like to talk about the war, in which he ran with dispatches), my great-uncle’s enlistment paper and a photo of him in uniform (he was killed at Ypres France as a Captain – the great-uncle I never knew), and the will of one of my great’s (he survived as Under Marshal of Calais during Henry VII’s reign). His will was made in the transition between the late middle ages and the modern period, so it is very much indicative of a time when fighting was the norm, rather than the exception that it is today. It made me feel very sorry that today people still have to march off to war, and made me feel very, very grateful for the sacrifices that previous generations and member of our present generation have made and are making to build a better, more peaceful world.
I never met my paternal grandfather, since he died when my dad was a young man, but he apparently served in WWI as a sharpshooter in the Queen’s Own Rifles. My dad also told me that his father’s six brothers were all killed in the war.
On my mother’s side, they were all Mennonites, but asking her about it, it sounds like some of them served in the military as well, in spite of the agreement with the Canadian government for exemption from military service as part of their deal for settling the west.
I guess I’m a product of both of these influences - a pacifist who is very grateful for what soldiers have done.
Six brothers. That’s one hell of a price to pay.
Indeed.
I went over to the Legislature building, where there was a poetry reading / howitzer firing / medal ceremony.
I wasn’t very close, so I spent a few minutes wondering why the gun crews had to wear dress uniform (with berets) instead of more weather appropriate toques, since their ears were starting to turn colour. All going really pink, that’s terrible! :eek: OMG even that black guy? 
Then I noticed they had pink ear plugs in. :o
But seriously, it’s too cold for berets!
Yeah, count me in. I don’t think I’ve seen a just war in my life–I’m not sure about Syria–but, yes. War is beyond words in the waste and destruction. And I am very grateful for anyone who has served, because I don’t have it in me to do so.
A pacifist grateful to those who served, absolutely. I can respect the soldiers even when I do not agree with those who send them to war.
How very lucky we are to live in Canada. I’ve never seen a tank roll down my street, never heard a shot fired, never held someone who’s dying for a cause.
Thank you, to those who have.
We didn’t go to Victory Square, we went to the ceremony at Canadian Memorial United Church. The history of the church is on the website, it was made to be a memorial to those fallen in the “Great War”. The service was quite meaningful, they read names of those lost in both WWI and WWII as well as Afghanistan. With Afghanistan they read the ages out too.
Thats when my tears started running.
Thank you to all those who have served. My father grew up without a father because of WWII, and to me that loss reverberated through my childhood. My grandmother, long since remarried would spend November 11th crying for her first husband and lost youth. November 11th must always be a day of Rememberance.
I love the Google Doodle today. 31st anniversary of the Canadarm.
Former Premier of Alberta Ralph Klein got the Order of Canada today. Calgary is still trying to recover from his reign. Strange world we live in.
21º yesterday, and I was out in my shirtsleeves to finish putting up the outside Christmas lights and pack up the lawn and garden stuff in the shed for the winter, lovely day with a few scattered clouds. Today - high of 4º with occasional snow flakes in the morning. Just another Ottawa fall!
The local press is proclaiming Klein’s greatest achievement as premier as being eliminating Alberta’s debt. What they seem to forget is that the province was in the black before he arrived in office and that we still had quality health care and education. Post secondary tuition fees have doubled since he showed up,the schools are decimated and health care delivery is crap.
Maybe the folks in Ottawa who decide who should receive these awards think Prince Ralph earned it by hoisting Alberta on its own pertard? Just a theory…
Least deserving member of the Order of Canada. Ever.
Commie!
Thanks, man. I didn’t know you cared. 
You two better be careful or you’re going to get kicked out of Alberta with that kind of talk. Next thing you know you’ll be suggesting that increasing taxes is a better way for the government to raise revenue than slapping user fees on everything under the sun.
I think Muffin may be right about you.
Since becoming an adult in the late 80s, I have never once voted for the provincial Conservative Party and I don’t intend to start any time soon.
Hey, I always say that a little Socialism goes a long way. 
Didn’t Conrad Black get one?
True, but it looks like he will be stripped of it.