Saturday, 9 November 2013

Remembrance Sunday Nov 2013

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

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