Thursday, November 12, 2009

Adieu, Kishu

A handful of local businesses went up in smoke and flame this morning, as many outlets have reported. To venerate the area as a heritage district may be technically right, but it was the current popularity of places like Slickity Jim's that make the fire a blow for the area. Kishu offered cheap sushi, Lugz Coffee was a bit overpriced for my taste, but the businesses were integral parts of the community's fabric. Adieu.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Re: memory

November 11 holds an increasingly curious place in those countries where it was once known primarily as the day of the armistice that effectively ended the great war of 1914-1918. Its significance in many parts of Europe is connected with a chain of other historical events (Latvia's experience is but one example, as the film Defenders of Riga highlights), while in Canada and the UK, a generational shift is taking place as the last veterans of that war die. Time inexorably takes us further from the origins of the day and, as a society, further from a personal connection with its importance.

It wasn't always so. The binoculars our family used when I was a kid had seen service in the first great war of the 20th century. My grandfather enlisted in 1915, was wounded, then died on duty in 1945, having served again in the century's second great war. An uncle, aunt and my father also served in the 1939-1945 war, and I grew up conscious of the sacrifices made by that generation.


HMCS Dunver, my father's ship (more photos here)
But as the generations pass, so does the torch of remembrance. The generation coming of age today was born further from the start of the second great war than I was from the armistice November 11 marks. The fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Cold War are history for them, not a memory. And the soldiers with experience of conflict today are met by a society whose attitudes range from ambiguous to hostile. There is no longer a collective memory of war.

And in many ways, that's a good thing. We must remember, however, that war takes a toll. The losses of 1914-1918 were so dramatic and far-reaching that people could not ignore this truth, and committed to remembering the sacrifices made in the hope of preventing them from happening again. The greater holocaust of the century's second great war and the peace and disarmament demonstrations of the 1950s onwards have made our own generation even more firm in its anti-war stance. War is as much a relic of the past for many of us as the planes that make ceremonial fly-overs (as they did above Vancouver today), not the living terror of our generation.

Those who have been there, those who bear its scars on their bodies and minds, demand our continued empathy. Canada continues to have a standing army, and lest we forget, remembrance day gives us a time to honour and maybe even understand the sacrifices still being made, wounds yet to heal, the elusive peace still sought at too great a price.