Lest we forget.

Can you hear that? The military planes just flew by again. I'll stop right now for a minute of silence, since it's 11:00.

11:01. Lest we forget.

Every year at school we would have a ceremony and every year it would be the same. Some presentations about the horrors of WWI and WWII, some cheezy poems and someone would always say a speech about how they didn't know what war was like, about how our veterans sacrificed themselves to bring us peace. Every year my question has been the same: what peace?

I think the problem with Remembrance Day is that we put too much emphasis on WWI and WWII. We have ceremonies, we look at veterans laying wreaths at cenotaphs and we notice every year that there are less and less of them out. We always talk about war as if it is something from the past.

We always seem to lose sight of the fact that the average age of a Canadian war vet right now is somewhere around 38. That's far from the hunched over old men you see hobbling down the street. We had people in Korea, Bosnia, the Gulf War, Rwanda and other places that I can't recall right now. We still have armed forces in Afghanistan, Haiti and the Sudan, among others.

The fighting didn't end at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. We have a long way to go yet.

I am not saying that we should discount the events of the two world wars. What I am saying is that we should not let them overshadow the conflicts that are currently happening. It seems irresponsible to me to talk about the horrors of war in the past without aknowledging the horrors of war today. I think Rememberance Day should not only be a solemn occasion where we look to the past, but also a celebration of peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts abroad.