WE NEED A SECOND REMEMBRANCE DAY
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
The British soldier/poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote these words nearly a hundred years ago but I find myself thinking about them quite often of late. Every year around the 11th of November I am inundated with e-mail tributes to our fallen soldiers - poems, songs, pictorials - with notes urging me to remember, and demands that I pass these sentiments along.
And that is fine with me. We should remember our war dead. But I’m beginning to think that we’ve got the wrong day. You want a day to show that you care about the men and women who serve our country? Try election day.
There’s something wrong about setting aside one day a year to commemorate our soldiers, and then ignoring the decisions that have landed them in harm’s way for the other 364. I’m talking about the decisions brought down by our federal government and specifically I’m talking about Afghanistan. It is time to get the hell out. We have more than honored our commitment to NATO, but more importantly - we’re on a fool’s errand there. We don’t have an identifiable goal, we’re fighting an enemy we can’t see, and we’re falling deeper into a quagmire of Viet Nam-like disaster. You can not win there. The enemy is tribal, and it is brutal, and it is cowardly. And every week more young Canadians - 132 to date - come home in a box.
And yet the people who make our foreign policy go unquestioned. I live in an area that votes largely Conservative. (the completely useless Diane Finley is our MP - we might as well have elected a fence post) And come election day, all these people who were sending out dewey-eyed Remembrance Day tributes yesterday will strap on their blinders and vote for Harper again. This is the same Harper who stated (and later lied about it) that he would have sent Canadian troops to Iraq. What qualifications has he to make these decisions? Who is advising him? Our Minister of Defense is Peter McKay. I wouldn’t trust this idiot to inflate the tires on my truck and yet he decides where and when our soldiers fight...and die. How stupid is Peter McKay? He wanted to marry Belinda Stronach. I rest my case.
Keep in mind that there are countries where the citizenship doesn’t get a say in these matters. Canada isn’t one of them. If you want to demonstrate that you care about our men and women in the forces, then I suggest you do it two days a year. The first day is November 11.
The second is election day.
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
The British soldier/poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote these words nearly a hundred years ago but I find myself thinking about them quite often of late. Every year around the 11th of November I am inundated with e-mail tributes to our fallen soldiers - poems, songs, pictorials - with notes urging me to remember, and demands that I pass these sentiments along.
And that is fine with me. We should remember our war dead. But I’m beginning to think that we’ve got the wrong day. You want a day to show that you care about the men and women who serve our country? Try election day.
There’s something wrong about setting aside one day a year to commemorate our soldiers, and then ignoring the decisions that have landed them in harm’s way for the other 364. I’m talking about the decisions brought down by our federal government and specifically I’m talking about Afghanistan. It is time to get the hell out. We have more than honored our commitment to NATO, but more importantly - we’re on a fool’s errand there. We don’t have an identifiable goal, we’re fighting an enemy we can’t see, and we’re falling deeper into a quagmire of Viet Nam-like disaster. You can not win there. The enemy is tribal, and it is brutal, and it is cowardly. And every week more young Canadians - 132 to date - come home in a box.
And yet the people who make our foreign policy go unquestioned. I live in an area that votes largely Conservative. (the completely useless Diane Finley is our MP - we might as well have elected a fence post) And come election day, all these people who were sending out dewey-eyed Remembrance Day tributes yesterday will strap on their blinders and vote for Harper again. This is the same Harper who stated (and later lied about it) that he would have sent Canadian troops to Iraq. What qualifications has he to make these decisions? Who is advising him? Our Minister of Defense is Peter McKay. I wouldn’t trust this idiot to inflate the tires on my truck and yet he decides where and when our soldiers fight...and die. How stupid is Peter McKay? He wanted to marry Belinda Stronach. I rest my case.
Keep in mind that there are countries where the citizenship doesn’t get a say in these matters. Canada isn’t one of them. If you want to demonstrate that you care about our men and women in the forces, then I suggest you do it two days a year. The first day is November 11.
The second is election day.
posted by Brad Smith at
9:25 AM
1 Comments
