We don’t need a Remembrance Day law
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HOW would you not mark an anniversary that’s all about the enormous price this country’s veterans have paid over and over, with their very lives in many cases, to preserve that value sacred to democracy — freedom?
By making it compulsory to honour our vets’ sacrifice with two minutes of silence every Nov. 11.
Yet there it is — a poll just out, commissioned by the Historica-Dominion Institute, saying that 70 per cent of Canadians would support the idea of making it the law that two minutes of silence must be observed by everyone at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
The poll, done a week ago, asked just over 1,000 people a range of questions related to Remembrance Day.
Now, I don’t think 70 per cent of Canadians really believe that honouring our war vets should be made mandatory.
Why not?
First, because it doesn’t make sense on a fundamental level. Second, because logistically it would be nightmarish to try to enforce.
As is the case with a lot of snap answers given to pollsters, my guess is many respondents — meaning well — went with their gut and said "Sure, people should have to stop and pay respect to our vets," without thinking it through.
Though I do wonder about the 57 per cent who apparently also figured that all activities, even traffic in the streets, should cease at the appointed time. That one does kind of shake my faith in people’s common sense, I admit.
I mean, does that include the highways, including entrance and exit ramps? How about tunnels and bridges? Streets near fire or police departments? Hospital emergency zones? What if our watches weren’t synchronized?
Bad idea.
The basic flaw, though, is the contradiction that we should make it compulsory to honour those who fought to keep us free.
It’s worth noting that there are two anniversaries this week that speak to perseverance in pursuit of that fundamental human ideal — freedom.
Monday marked the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the Berlin Wall — and with it the Cold War.
For those born since that world-changing day, the long, dark shadow cast over the West by the Cold War — when the icy grip of Soviet totalitarianism enslaved millions in Eastern Europe — is thankfully now just part of history, something awful that once happened but is no more.
I remember, however, when many on the left ridiculed American president Ronald Reagan for standing before Berlin’s famous Brandenburg Gate in 1987 and daring Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!"
The Soviet empire seemed so vast, so entrenched, that its demise seemed impossible. But, as the events of two years later dramatically showed, decades of communist compulsion did not, could not, kill people’s basic yearning to be free.
The notion that the German government should pass a law today making it mandatory for its citizens to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall would be rejected as both ludicrous and anathema to the very spirit of that achievement.
The same is true of making two minutes of silence mandatory on Nov. 11.
Of course, there’s virtually no chance Ottawa would ever pass such legislation concerning Remembrance Day.
On Nov. 5, the House of Commons did unanimously urge all Canadians to observe two minutes of silence at the appropriate time on Nov. 11.
Who could disagree with that?
To be fair, the newly formed Historica-Dominion Institute (recently created by merging the Historica Foundation of Canada with the Dominion Institute, two organizations devoted to teaching Canadians about themselves) was clearly trying to make a point, through its poll, about the importance of honouring the meaning of
Nov. 11.
All but one of the men and women who served in the First World War, from which the first Armistice Day arose to mark the formal end to that horrific conflict, are now gone.
The Second World War ended 64 years ago; its veterans are also dwindling in number.
The message and tradition of Remembrance Day must not die with them.
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