Thread by @ReiverHall

1/ It’s #RemembranceDay2019 and I’d like to share my thoughts on what both remembrance and service mean to me.

Let’s start with remembrance - the intent of this day is to remember those who went before us and “gave their tomorrow’s for our today.”

/2 What did they give their lives for? In the words of the Constitution it could be “peace, order and good government”, or it could be something else, something more profound?

3/ I’m leaning towards something more profound. What does it mean to be Canadian? To me anyways it means to be part of a society that values individual freedoms and social co-operation.

4/ what has happened over the years is that the social definition of who is Canadian has widened. It started pretty much with British stock and the Quebecois elites. It’s expanded slowly and only grudgingly at first. And frankly, we’re still not where we should be.

5/ But we’re trying. Really WWI was the beginning - the idea that Canadians were better together and that we were something other than “British-lite”. We were Canadians.
The veterans who went over the top brought back the ideal that regardless of where our ancestors came from..

6/ that we could work together for amazing ends. Let’s not forget we weren’t where the rhetoric says we should have been - we imprisoned many Ukrainians for the offence of being Ukrainian and some Ukrainians were from Austria-Hungary, our enemy.

7/ We still segregated the First Nations.

During the interwar years we started to come together a little better - nothing like shared hardships of a Depression to do that.

Then came the Austrian corporal.

8/ Despite not learning the lesson of not imprisoning people because of their ethnic heritage until after the war, mainly because the logical conclusion of that policy and authoritarianism stared us in the face.

9/ We’re not where we should be, but we’re still trying to live up to the ideal. It’s the ideal and the effort to never stop trying to be better that is what’s important. It’s looking to the future and what we want Canada to be, not an imperfectly remembered past.

10/ Remembrance is threefold - what we were, what we want to be and who will help us get there.

11/ Service to the ideal is important. Service must not be blind or given thoughtlessly. It must be given for the goal of being the better us.

12/ The Cenotaph in Ottawa is a perfect metaphor for what I want to achieve by service - it is figures of all the branches of military service striding purposefully towards an unseen objective.

13/ Not all can serve in the same way. Service is not limited when the goal is a better world - it can be as simple as helping our fellows when they need it, listening when someone needs an ear, being an example.

At the end of the day - just be decent.
#LestWeForget

To the Gunners of the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery -
I remember
Je me souviens