Remembering

Remembrance Day and What Makes Us Canadian

There is something different about Canada. Remembrance, or Armistice, Day is celebrated everywhere in the world. And there are commemorations of those who died for their country also, everywhere in the world. But Canada is different. We don't celebrate Remembrance Day. We remember it. 

Of any other day in the year, be it Grey Cup or Thanksgiving or Canada Day, Remembrance Day is a day void of politics, although some attempt to use it as such. It is a day of quiet. It is a day of silence. It is a day we can acknowledge something we cannot express. It is this day, more than anything else, that makes our country what it is. 

You see, no matter what your political beliefs, no matter your language or where you are from or even if you are acknowledged as a Canadian. Within the law or outside of the law, Native, non-native, French, English, Inuit, recently arrived or the first people who got here, rich, poor, doing ok or not; young, old, child, woman, girl, boy, male, female, within our Country or a friend or ally; no matter who, where or what; we are brought together by our dead. We are not united in this world; we are united in the next. There hangs a pall over our country as we remember our dead together.

There are terrible injustices throughout our country. Greed and corruption are rampant. They did not die for the powerful or upright. They died for us: that we may remember them. That on this day we can hear them say that to us they pass the torch. In spite of the odds, in spite of who we are, we must respond to a call that is lost in the silence of the past. All of us must respond. That is what we are: the response and the echo of guns silenced.