Sometimes our biweekly publishing schedule is a bit awkward.
Today’s paper comes out two days before the official launch of the Royal Canadian Legion’s annual Poppy Campaign, that raises important funds to be used directly in service to veterans. It’s also a week before the beginning of Veterans’ Week and two full weeks before Remembrance Day itself.
Our next paper will be on November 11, so it will be impossible for us to cover local Remembrance Day activities in a timely manner.
Better early than never, we have Remembrance Day content and ads for you in today’s pages. We didn’t aggressively sell ad space for the occasion—as a veteran-owned business that’s not our way. But we are grateful for the support of elected officials and local businesses, and happy that they felt it appropriate to honour those who offered and gave their lives for Canada.
Now it’s our turn, all of us. Please wear a poppy. I’ve heard all the excuses why people don’t, but they all ring hollow. Whatever our personal causes, we can—we must—observe the simple gesture of remembering those who sacrificed their lives for a higher ideal.
Consider joining your local Legion branch. You don’t have to be a Vet or the child of a Vet. You only need to support the Legion’s values of remembrance, service and advocacy for veterans, and community service.
If you can, attend the nearest Remembrance Day service. It matters. If you can’t attend, maybe you can stop and reflect for two minutes at 11 o’clock. Consider how lucky we are to live in a beautiful, generous, peaceful country and appreciate the cost that others have paid to make it so.
Remembrance Day isn’t the one day of the year for us to remember our war dead. We should reflect often. But it’s the one day of the year for us to pause as a nation and remember together.
War is not glorious. Death on the battlefield—on the ground, at sea, or in the skies—is not glorious. It is cruel, agonizing, heartbreaking slaughter.
War is Hell. And that’s why we must never turn our backs on the memory of those who stepped up and those who died. They gave so much more than the rest of us can imagine.
Lest we forget.