My reflection on Remembrance Day

Reflecting on Remembrance Day

Today is Remembrance Day. For all the years, my three girls went to a local public school, I went to the Remembrance Day service and cried.

From JK to Grade 6, these precious kids filed into the gym with rows of chairs set up for the parents and some grandparents. The gym would end up being packed, often standing room only.

A lone bagpiper would enter playing Piper’s Lament or The Last Post. The Piper’s Lament is an ancient melody composed to mimic the sounds of women and children crying over their dead.

How lucky are we?

How lucky are these little boys and girls to have a future that will almost certainly not involve being in a war or affected by war? When my girls were younger, we occasionally talked about war, racial violence, and bias.

I remember one time explaining the history of slavery to one girl. She looked at me with a deeply perplexed look and could not figure out how slavery or biases of any kind made sense. That was a hopeful moment for me. Hopeful that kids will grow up having experienced the richness of diversity that tells us we are more alike than different.

My grandfather, a Canadian, was in WW1 and fought in France in the trenches. My father was in the Royal Canadian Navy in WW2 and spent most of his time on ships in the North Atlantic.

My grandfather, whose name was Alan German but called Pete for some unknown reason, joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force when the war broke out. He soon found himself in the trenches in France. We have a letter he wrote to his parents in February 1916. I put a book together of the old photos of the war he left behind, and the story told in that letter of a trench raid he planned and led. That trench raid was the first recorded instance in the war where a successful attack had been made without artillery preparation to cut the wire.

The letter home did not hold back on the reality of a cold night, leading men through barbed wire across no man’s land to kill as many enemies as possible. A Corporal Conlin, right beside my grandfather, was shot through the head and fell at his feet. A German came out of a dugout and went to fire at my grandfather, but the safety was one. He recounts that things moved very fast, and they were in the fight for about 6 minutes, killing many more of the enemy than the Canadians or British were killed. It was deemed a great success.

A much longer accounting by my grandfather ended up in The Atlantic Magazine in the December 1916 issue. But, again, there were even more gruesome details of the horrors of war.

The ship my father was on came into Halifax harbour for fuel and stores. My father got quite sick and had to be moved to an infirmary in Halifax. While there, the ship was called back to duty, and my father was left behind. Shortly after leaving Halifax harbour, his ship was torpedoed, and all hands were lost. That was the only story he told me about his time in the war.

I was out for a walk this morning with my two red labs and saw a friend approaching. I called to him, saying, “Peace, brother!” He came back with an agreement that more peace would be better.

I want to explore this thought more deeply again, but for now, I feel a significant paradigm shift is happening, slowly, maybe over a few generations but picking up momentum. We, as humans, have a history of violence. In wars, death is an accepted cost of the goal. People are invaded or abused physically, and countries have been invaded.

I wonder if it could be a fact that there has been more opposition to the war in Ukraine and humanity coming to it than ever before. It just feels like this old-school paradigm of force and violence is highly objectionable to more and more people. And the evidence is it is highly destructive to economic stability and progress.

I gave blood the other day and met a young Iranian doctor who had just come to Canada and was waiting to write his exams to qualify him to practice here. We spoke about the protests in Iran. He was clear that the regime had to go, and there should be greater freedom. Then, as if to finalize our agreed thinking, I said with a strong voice, “women are equal and should have the full rights men have, right?” He agreed.

The paradigm shift is from autocratic narrow thinking and violent ambitions to collective, interdependent freedoms-based progress. Perhaps climate change, natural disasters, and the general degrading of our planet’s environment are part of the stimulus.

Even on a small scale relatively, business leadership is changing. Toxic or autocratic environments are no longer acceptable. Instead, more humanity is arriving on the scene.

We have a problem coming at us hard; our natural world is in decline.

If a company or country leader wants to be a hero and go down in history with big accolades, it will be for fixing stuff for the better, not destroying it.

People matter.

Peace,

John