🕯️ Lest We Forget
The Meaning of Remembrance in a Forgetful Age
Every November, we pause — or at least, we’re supposed to.
For a single minute, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we’re asked to stand in silence. To remember.
But remembrance is not silence. It’s not a ceremony. It’s not the sound of a trumpet, or the echo of boots on cold pavement.
Remembrance is a living act — one that demands something from us. It calls on us not just to recall the fallen, but to understand what they fell for.
🌺 The Fading Memory
As generations pass, fewer veterans attend parades. The medals grow heavier in display cases, and the stories — those vivid, heartbreaking, human stories — begin to fade into the background noise of a distracted world.
For many younger Canadians, Remembrance Day has become another day off, a hashtag, a moment of performative patriotism before scrolling to the following video.
But those who fought — and those who never came home — deserve more than hashtags. They deserve to be remembered as individuals who carried impossible burdens so we could live as we do.
⚙️ The Cost of Freedom
The phrase “freedom isn’t free” has been repeated so often that it risks losing meaning. Yet it remains one of the most brutally honest truths in human history.
Freedom — absolute freedom — is paid for in blood, sweat, and grief.
It is defended not by slogans, but by the willingness of ordinary people to stand in extraordinary moments and say: Not on my watch.
From the muddy trenches of Ypres and Vimy Ridge to the frozen hills of Korea, from the deserts of Afghanistan to peacekeeping missions across the globe — Canadians have stood where others fell. Not as conquerors, but as defenders of something far greater than territory: the idea that human dignity and decency are worth dying for.
🕊️ Remembering Beyond the Uniform
Remembrance Day is not just for soldiers.
It’s for nurses who carried the wounded, engineers who built the bridges, farmers who fed the front, mothers who wept at the kitchen table when the telegram arrived.
It’s for Indigenous veterans who fought for a country that denied them citizenship.
It’s for those who returned home — but never really came back.
To remember them is to confront the uncomfortable truth that war doesn’t end when the guns go silent. It lingers in minds, in families, in generations.
🧠 The Duty of the Living
If remembrance is to mean anything, it must live beyond ceremony.
It must shape how we treat one another — in our politics, our communities, our conversations.
It must remind us that division, arrogance, and hatred are the very seeds of the conflicts our ancestors bled to prevent.
To remember is to take responsibility.
To honour their sacrifice is to build a country — and a world — that would make them proud.
🩶 Lest We Forget
So this year, as the bugle sounds and the world falls silent for that single minute, don’t just bow your head.
Remember their faces.
Remember their courage.
And remember that the peace we inherit is not a permanent state — it is a fragile promise, renewed only when we choose to live as they did: with courage, humility, and love for something larger than ourselves.
Because remembrance is not about the past.
It’s about who we choose to be today.