Remembrance Sunday 10/11/13
Why bother with remembering? It is not a question that I ever recall asking myself
when I was growing up. Perhaps that is because my early years were the years of
WW11. Maybe my days in our church choir and the annual procession to the War
Memorial on the equivalent of this day each year made Remembrance Sunday an
occasion to be respected in this fashion. It was, in other words, a part of life. The
buses and cars stopped – people stood still – hats and caps removed – for this briefest
of times on this day, we remembered and we gave thanks. But today in this country
the majority will instead ask my initial question namely - why bother?
At one level the response is easy. It is summed up in the recollection that we should
not take our freedom for granted – they died that we might remain free. But today so
many other things – material, emotional and personal, demand attention that debates
about freedom, what it means and how much we value it, seem remote and irrelevant,
in other words not worth bothering with.
Yet I think we should bother and continue to do what we do. I watched a television
programme not so long ago and during the course of it we saw Simon Schama in
Tel Aviv on Holocaust Memorial Day – the equivalent, it could be said, of our
Remembrance Sunday – and Tel Aviv came to a halt at the prescribed time and
everyone stood and remembered just as they had in my youth.
And lest we are tempted to make the excuse that Jews are more religious than us let us
recall that it may be so, but that is not the whole story by any means.
Closer to the truth might be that we value what we have a lot more when we are in
danger of losing it. Freedom in Israel is constantly under threat from every side
whereas we feel safe and therefore our freedom is, in that sense, less valued.
The overwhelming secular argument for remembrance should be, it seems to me, that
recollection of the reasons for caring about freedom, ought to help us to avoid the
mistakes that led to its being in danger in the first place. An example of such wisdom
could have been our remembering how we were defeated in Afghanistan twice before
the present shambles. That knowledge of our history might have helped our leaders to
avoid the same mistake again.
History today is not valued as it was in my youth nor is it taught from the same
perspective. But sadly there seems to be a paradox here. The value of the, if I may
use the term, ‘socialised’ history as it is taught today seems to be in inverse proportion
to its usefulness in avoiding pitfalls that might otherwise be foreseen.
Remembrance can therefore be seen as vital not just in teaching us humility in
the face of the sacrifice of our forebears but also in safeguarding us against future
dangers. In that respect the nation that forgets its history is in danger of forgetting
why it exists at all. What does it stand for if it cannot remember how it arrived here?
Israel remembers its history and respects its ancestors and so should we. The
alternative is not a pleasant option in my view.
Tony Kidd
