With all the political bickering, the looming budget vote and the subsequent election next year, we often forget things that matter.
Yesterday mattered. Yesterday was Remembrance Day, the day that we remember the dead of WWI and II.
In his homily, Archbishop Paul Cremona said that everyone can contribute to peace. “God did not make mankind for wars and wars could only be justified to protect justice and humanity,” he said.
How true. We all know the story of WWII, a madman convinced a nation that they were right to pursue a campaign of ethnic cleansing. He was joined by opportunistic Italy and expansionist Japan. In the next four years, millions lost their lives as a result of war and persecution.
WWI was different. It was sheer pigheadedness and the treaties of the day that again, cost the lives of millions.
Remembrance Day is observed on 11 November to recall the end of hostilities of World War I on that date in 1918. Hostilities formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
The day was dedicated by King George V on 7 November 1919 as a day of remembrance for members of the armed forces who were killed during World War I.
The red remembrance poppy has become a familiar emblem of Remembrance Day due to the poem ‘In Flanders Fields’. These poppies bloomed across some of the worst battlefields of Flanders in World War I, their brilliant red colour an appropriate symbol for the blood spilled in the war.
We talk of war today. The Libyan war. The Bosnian war. The Syrian war. The Arab-Israeli war. But they are not on our doorstep and they do not involve the slaughter of millions and pit who continents into a death match.
All people who are casualties of war should be remembered. But we should remember the fallen of WWI and WWII because of the sheer indiscriminate scale of loss of life that was witnessed. Young men were sent off to the front (or to defend the front), innocent families were wiped off the earth as bombs hot homes, young people died and old people died.
Minorities were persecuted, humiliated and tortured. We have never since seen anything like it, and nor should we again. We live in a changing world. A world where everything that we took for granted, thanks to those that died, is now in jeopardy. We are learning that a prosperous life in not guaranteed and that we have to work ever harder to keep up. This is true. But we should remember that if it were not for the people who gave up their lives in the fight against tyranny and oppression, then we would not even have this life. We should never forget.