Remembrance 2024

[dewline]

85 years after D-Day.
75 years after the founding of NATO.
10 years after the end of major Canadian Forces operations in Afghanistan.
8 years since the first election of the Vulgarian to the White House.

I expect to be watching the Ottawa ceremonies from my mother's care home this morning.

Comments

[cmcmck]

VE day is my birthday so rather hard to forget!

[extraarcha]

Ottawa ceremonies?
Sad to admit i know nothing about this.
My rather brief search didn't turn up anything?

[dewline]

I used to attend in person before the Pandemic started.

Now, I settle for televised coverage.

[kaffy_r]

I watched the Ottawa ceremony via the CBC livestream, which is always available in the states for Remembrance Day.

I was grateful that I could watch. I'm old enough that I remember, as a very young girl, two Boer War veterans attending our town's cenotaph ceremony. They came in wheelchairs, and I only saw them at maybe two Remembrance Day ceremonies. But there's a time-binding effect of that memory.

My grandfather was in the RAF brifly before transferring to the RCAF. He was an ace, credited with 13 kills in WW1. I'm weirdly proud (probably problematically) of that. My mother was a nursing sister in the Royal Canadian Navy, prior to meeting my dad. My uncle flew on bomber missions in Europe, and could never abide hearing "Lili Marlene" because a close friend was humming it when he was killed by shrapnel.

It's hard to explain to many younger folks why it's important to remember.

[dewline]

And the last surviving Canadian WW 1 veteran died within our shared living memory.

So that's another time-binder...

[arlie]

I feel so old. World War I was very much living memory to those around me when I was a child. Of course that's even more true of World War II. And someone made a point of bringing a concentration camp survivor to visit my elementary school.

[kaffy_r]

Agreed.