Remembrance must be from the heart

REMEMBRANCE cannot be just an obligation or duty carried out once a year in front of a memorial, else it will become meaningless, resented and rejected. It has to be from the heart, entirely voluntary and a regular part of life and relevant to today.

The real danger is that repetition of the same old format makes the annual event of remembrance like that of taking an ancient tatty volume from a dark and dusty cupboard and opening it to read lists of nearly forgotten figures from a distant past, because that is the thing that has been always done.

Now is that important to the youth of today, living their busy lives, when for them war is a distant happening on TV and in films, something that is really irrelevant and of no concern as they are convinced that it can never happen to them, so why should they ever bother to pause to remember?

They must be told that the mistakes of the past cannot be wilfully ignored if we wish to avoid repeating them in the future and the selfless sacrifice of our dead is the reason that we are free and able to discuss remembrance today.

This means that they must know that peace is the reward for perpetual vigilance and that ignoring and turning a blind eye to the happenings in the world eventually means that people have to fight to keep their freedom and possibly in the future it might be them doing the fighting.

So there must always be an ongoing commitment to those that made the ultimate sacrifice, as their actions are lessons from the past which we ignore at our peril.

But they must not be worshipped or put on a pedestal, for they were ordinary people like ourselves who were called to do their duty for their country and did it as best they could.

Therefore, if we feel the need to remember, how is the best way to do it? Possibly by making the sacrifices and endeavours of past generations a part of our present lives, through caring for those in need around us. Something which would fulfil the wishes and promises made to the soldiers of the Great War, which was that when they returned home to Britain there would be a society ‘fit for heroes to live in’.

If the young people following us manage to create such a society, then they will be the heroes!

David W Shopland