Sombre Thoughts on Remembrance Day

I am lucky to live where I live and when I live.

I read about war. I watch war movies. I see images of war on the news, involving other places and other people. But in my lifetime, so far, I don't have a personal connection to war. And I smugly assume that I never will.

I can't fathom the courage that it took - it takes - for people to go to war, fighting for something that they believe in. People fought for me to have a place and time where I can live a lifetime without a personal connection to war. The peaceful bubble that I live in is the realization of their dreams for their descendants. I am the tree that grew because years ago they planted a seed they knew they wouldn't see grow in their lifetime.

And here are the problems that weigh me down, decades later:

• My leg is still hurting after running my half marathon a week ago.
• The Leafs lost to the Bruins.
• I still haven't found time to get my flu shot.
• My car needs new tires and brakes.
• And so on.

I live in a generation of weakness, selfishness, pettiness, and entitlement. We walk past people on the street as if they've chosen to be where they are. We read about people suffering and dying around the world, and maybe we send them a little something. We wave our fists at the guy who cut us off turning into the mall. We fly into a rage when the cable companies or the phone companies overcharge us.

And once a year, we are asked to take a few minutes and remember the people who gave their lives so we could have it this way. But I don't remember any of these people and their names mean nothing to me. I am asked to remember people I never knew. I feel obliged to try, but there's nothing emotional to draw on.

So maybe, for me, the best I can do is to Realize rather than to Remember: To spend a few minutes today thinking about the price that others paid so that I can feel "lucky" to live where I live when I live. To Realize that almost nothing about the fact that I am here, living a great life, is a result of anything I've done. To Realize that I am standing on the actions and decisions and sacrifices of people I will never know. To Realize that it is wrong to behave as if the world owes this to me.

In his introduction to "A Short History of Nearly Everything" Bill Bryson says:

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
...  

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely-make that miraculously-fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result-eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you.

When I first read the book, those words blew me away. Talk about a profound Realization.

And later, those same words led me to the obvious, but not-so-obvious Realization that if I could travel back to any point in time, there would be at least one of my ancestors alive with whom I could sit down and have a tea and chat (or whatever the time, place, and species equivalent would be).

What would they think of me living in a place and at a time that so closely resembles the dreams they had for me? What would they think of me? Am I worthy of the sacrifices they made?

Not yet.

Time, once again, to try harder...