Remembering

I lost my poppy on the subway coming home yesterday. I’ve been fairly careful of it being able to stay on the lapel of my jacket ever since I got it, but it still found itself falling to the ground, and the bustle of the crowd prevented me from picking it up. From the moment I realized it was gone, I felt like I lost my stance in remembering the past. With it gone, I felt like just another person who wasn’t wearing the symbolic felt flower. In a flash, I was also shocked that there was a flavour of self-righteousness underneath, so in this way, I warn you for what may come next, but this is one of my webcorners.

It was probably in high school when I became more aware of what Remembrance Day meant. It was the history videos shown in classes,  the stories and lessons told, the grade 11 English class that had us watching Shindler’s list, and stories that stuck like the conditions in the WWI trenches were so bad, that your front toe would begin to rot, and rodents would come and nibble on it at night, and without that big toe on your foot, you couldn’t walk properly, nevermind running away from the enemy.

For awhile, Remembrance Day was a day of going through the motions – the school assembly, the moment of silence, and readings of In Flander’s Fields. I didn’t understand it, and slowing down to try to really comprehend it was uncomfortable. My parents who don’t make a point of engaging much with the outside world also didn’t help. Whatever happened on the outside was of no interest to them in expressing it. Instead, it was fragments of words that stayed with me and prodded me to try to continue to understand. I couldn’t forget ‘Those who do not remember sins of the past are doomed to commit them again’, and the last lines of John MacCrae’s poem had always painted a unsettling picture in the back of my mind. “If ye break faith with us who die/We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/In Flander’s Fields.”

I remember back in the public school system years there seemed a fairly sized number of people who wore poppies, or at least it felt something like it. Remembrance Day was important enough to call everyone out of their classrooms for an assembly. It was the norm of the world at the time, to make a big deal out of it, but once I stepped out of it and the world got bigger, like so many other things such as voting, that great collective stance to care, became the minority, and you wondered why people didn’t stand up for things taught back in school that was right, noble even, and things you were told so much to not take for granted because you don’t know how good you actually have it.

Seeing poppies sprout out on other people’s clothing on the day right after Halloween has always been jarring for me. Its as if I’m being reminded of the worth society seems to put in a day that is about appearances and candy. This is not to say that I disapprove of Halloween, but there are so many frivolous things in the world that I see people would rather stand by, than what the education system has told me is good. Just because you don’t understand it and that it is in the past, and its over, everything is fine and dandy and will always be? Or because life is so busy, that there is no time to make an effort to remember and to do what you can?

As immigrants continue to come to this country, and as our WWII vets will be following the eventual road as our WWI ones, I can’t help but feel it is becoming even more imperative to remember. The reason why our country is the way it is is because of what happened in the past, and the stories of our veterans will not come from their lips forever. It is never possible to truly understand, but just the drive to want to be able to understand, may be enough.

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