There’s a reason for Nov. 11 to be designated as an important date on your calendar.
It’s not a statutory holiday designated for shopping, travelling or a last minute opportunity to get the Christmas lights hooked up around the eavestrough.
Our governments have set aside this particular day for us to spend at least a little bit of our precious time for some sombre reflections on the price paid for war.
The price paid for our two World Wars was immense, in terms of lives lost and talents wasted on combats. Minds that could have, and should have been turned towards helping their fellow citizens, were instead directed toward devising manners and means of killing one another, not helping them.
War is sad, it’s stupid and mostly unnecessary … until mad men come along to make them necessary.
Canadian men and women have been loyal in answering the call to arms in the past and in the present, with our airmen and soldiers being engaged in a fight to restore some peace and normalcy in Iraq, as we speak.
Next Tuesday, it would be wonderful to see a packed cafetorium at the Estevan Comprehensive School at 10:45 a.m., with people ready to pay homage and quiet respect for those who never made it back home from distant battles.
In the past few weeks, we have been struck with the realities of war and the strange thought processes that cloud the reasoning in young minds that cause them to turn guns on their fellow citizens in the name of some warped translations of religious extremism.
On Nov. 11, we will gather, not in the name of hatred, as these zealots do, but rather in the name of freedom, in the name of democracy.
We get to worship, gather, speak out, act out, travel, dress, and laugh with and at anything we please because we had brave men and women who came before us and were willing to die to protect those freedoms … willing to give their all, at an early age, so that tyrants could be kept in check.
We can eventually forget the political wrangling that accompanies and becomes the aftermath of each major conflict or war. We can forget the trillions of dollars spent on war-making machines and materials. Those bills eventually get paid.
But let us never forget the ultimate price. That bill can never be paid.
Let us never forget the fact that lives are to be cherished and those who gave them up on battlefields are due our utmost respect and an annual, respectful thank you.
We, above all others, must try to understand just how valuable a democracy is.
Let us not toy with it. Let us work to preserve it, just like those who died did so for us.
If we forget, we lose.
