Posted on 11/11/2003 9:04:06 AM PST by Grig
Veterans deserve our respect The student council at the University of Guelph banned any recognition of Remembrance Day
You probably didn't know Pte. John Smith Berry of the 48th Highlanders of Canada.
I didn't either. But no doubt, like all of us, he had family and friends who knew and loved him. But most of those are likely gone now.
So too were the hopes and dreams that Berry, like all young people, must have harboured, dreams which died with him on that battlefield in Italy on October 5, 1944.
There is a brass plaque in his honour, and several similar plaques, on the walls in St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in downtown Toronto, and no doubt, in most churches -- a silent testimony to all of us who enjoy our great freedoms, just what the price was to attain it.
Berry was one of 102,703 Canadians who died fighting in the two world wars of the last century, not counting another 500 or so who died in Korea, often called "The Forgotten War."
In the buildup to Remembrance Day red poppies have been sprouting on lapels everywhere -- despite the misguided efforts of anti-war activists trying to exploit the memory of Berry and his colleagues by pushing white poppies instead.
Most churches no doubt had Remembrance Day services Sunday. And most communities will have gatherings at their local cenotaphs, attended by the shrinking number of veterans to whom war, and the casualties of war, are much more than an academic debate or an opportunity for cheap sloganeering.
It is a shameful reality in Canada that that we owe these veterans so much, yet offer them so little.
Successive governments have fought every step of the way as various veterans groups have pushed for modest improvements in social programs to assist them. That, combined with the systematic destruction of our armed forces -- where our own soldiers are dying in Afghanistan because we won't give them proper equipment -- has contributed to a popular culture which dismisses war and the recognition of war as pure evil, making it popular, and easy, to ignore those who either did, or were willing to, offer the ultimate sacrifice against real, honest-to-God evil.
Last year the student council at the University of Guelph voted to ban any recognition of Remembrance Day on campus on the extraordinarily ignorant grounds that it somehow "glorified" war.
How dare they? Do they never wonder how it is they enjoy the privileges they do? Does it not occur to them that without the Pte. Berrys of this world, they would not be free to demonstrate their appalling ignorance to the world without serious consequences from the state?
Can we not expect university students, of all people, to understand the difference between glorification and respect? On the positive side, however, a few students, who do understand what previous generations sacrificed, openly defied the ban and staged their own Remembrance Day ceremony.
It used to be that every school child in Canada was taught to respect Remembrance Day. Not now.
But then, there was a time when Canada, largely because of its extraordinary contributions to the war efforts -- more than any other Allied country in the world on a per capita basis -- was respected both at home and abroad. Not because it possessed a war machine, but because so many of its young men and women were prepared to fight, if they had to, to preserve our way of life.
It is not all that surprising, given the fashionable tut-tutting against anything defined as militaristic, that the comfortable young people at the University of Guelph have no idea why Pte. Berry and his colleagues did what they did. It's likely they don't even know it happened. And obvious that they don't care.
But it did happen, and the best of Canadian youth at the time delivered a blow for freedom which should at least be worthy of true recognition, and appreciation, once a year on Remembrance Day.
At St. Andrew's Sunday, as the 93-year-old veteran tank commander proudly carried the wreath to the front of the church, his body bowed with age, but his spirit still strong and vibrant, many in the congregation wept, remembering, no doubt, their friends and family, some of whom made it back, many of whom who didn't.
There is no glorification of death and destruction here.
There is simply respect and gratitude. And shame on those who don't share it.
Ironically, Lt. Col. John McCrae, author of the poem "In Flanders Fields," was born in Guelph. His birthplace is a historic site.
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