Remembrance Day always makes me sad; it’s a set of memories that are slipping slowly away, drifting into nothingness.

Modern wars never go away. Grainy TV footage from Vietnam will be with us forever, as will the print and audio records created in the years since. I’ve no doubt that there are millions of video tapes around with world that include the opening of Operation Enduring Freedom - I know that I had an old man sitting on my couch skipping channels waiting for the world’s first scheduled for TV war to start, and I have no doubt that any number of people taped it. Enduring Freedom will likely endure forever, benefiting from the eternal life that comes from being nothing more than a set of 1s and 0s stored on an endless number of RAID devices with backups and backups and forwarded through so many SMTP servers that no one can possibly count. This particular collection of 1s and 0s has circled the world already, and will continue to do so for all eternity.

World War I and World War II are more elusive though; footage exists, but not in the same volume as these later wars. There were no embedded journalists in these conflicts, and the memories exist largely inside men and women like this; men and women who are dying rapidly at this point. My Grandfather is 84, and he’s considered young by some of these people. These memories are slipping away one by one, more and more with each passing day.

In Ontario Remembrance day stopped being a holiday, in part because kids had stopped going to ceremonies. In short, the purpose of the holiday had disappeared.

Today’s ceremony in Grandview Park was well attended by kids, even though British Columbia has maintained this as a holiday. I hope these kids keep going, and I hope that at some point the lessons that were supposed to be learned from the Great Wars past will hold, and the world’s leaders will no longer feel compelled to start new ones.

Perhaps Yasir Arafat’s death was well timed; perhaps peace will come to the Middle East after all.

On a day like today, I try to remain hopeful. Sometimes it’s hard.

Posted by skooter at 5:05 PM This entry is filed under Vancouver.