Canadian 16th machine-gun company soldiers at Passchendaele 

                       (credit: William Rider-Rider, via Wikimedia Commons)

We have to give top priority to the matters that matter. That, for me, is a prime aim in all of our political wrangling. So …what are our priorities and why do we say so? I think there is one giant principle that subsumes all the others. I think hardest about it on Remembrance Day.  

November 11 is a day of very solemn ceremonies in Canada. In fact, visitors to our country are often stunned by the seriousness of our Remembrance Day ceremonies. But, of course, we Canadians have reasons.

On November 11, 1918, the armistice that halted all the World War One fighting was signed. The worst war by far that the world had ever known up till that time finally ceased after four years and four months of bloodshed and horror and death. Cannons so big they needed rail cars to move them, tanks, fighter planes, dirigibles, machine guns, poison gas, flame throwers …all new technologies that were used first in World War One to achieve assembly line killing power.  

Drawing from a population of about 8 million, Canada sent an army of over 600,000 men to WWI. Of these, 1 in 9 died over there; three or four times that many were left permanently scarred physically; an even greater number were scarred mentally, doomed to lives of alcoholism, social dysfunction, and early death. Similar per capita casualties happened to the British, French, Italians, Americans, Austrians, Germans, and Russians, and all their allies. But I am Canadian, so I write from a Canadian perspective.

The nations waited only a generation and did it again with more nations, more terrible weapons, and much bigger numbers. 1939 to 1945. How many burnt lungs, busted skulls, dismembered legs and arms, and rotting, putrid corpses? And yes, those are ugly images and no, I don’t apologize for using them. 

Some of the young today get it into their heads still, after all the pain humans have inflicted on one another, that war can be glamorous, exciting, or heroic. A kind of adventure.

Eric Remarque’s novel “All Quiet On The Western Front” silences all of that kind of thinking completely. It ought to be required reading for all students in all parts of the world. The dedication at the beginning of the novel says:

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

First novel the Nazis burned. I wept when I finished it. I wanted to tear my teeth out of my head. The uselessness of all that pain and cruelty hit me like an emotional tidal wave. But unlike many other stories I read as a younger man, which faded in power and significance for me as the years went by, this one has gotten harder, yet more profound, with the passing of the decades.

I was born after World War II. 1949. But I saw what war did to people, men and women, who lived in my neighborhood.

Len lived across the avenue from us. I played with his sons, Roy and Melvin, from the time I was 3 and they were 3 and 4. I knew the family well.

Len had joined up at 18 in 1939. He was a big farm boy who could shoot. He was the average Canadian soldier in both world wars, though those boys were anything but average. They took on the hardest fighting, and they won nearly every time.

But back to Len. My mom, looking out her kitchen window as she worked at making meals in my early years, could not help but notice that Marion, Len’s wife, washed an awful lot of sheets. She had at least two double bed sheets drying on her line every day, even in winter, and sometimes did up to 6 a day, along with her other laundry.

At last, after a year or so, Mom asked Marion, tactfully, why she washed so many sheets. Marion confided that Len had seen some very fierce action in Europe and that he had been seriously wounded twice. He did sleep most nights, but only in bits. He had terrible nightmares. He would sweat right through upper and lower sheets sometimes three times in a night as he struggled to achieve normalcy again.

I couldn’t grasp it at 5, 6, and 7 years old. Then, they moved away to a small town 100 km. from Edmonton, close to Len’s original farming community. He seemed to do better. Or maybe he was beginning to heal. The human mind can be an amazing survivor when it has to be. Anyway, I never did see them again. I only heard about them through mutual friends in our neighborhood now and then.

Today? Today, my heart aches for Len. And for all those that he represents. Boys. They were just boys. They went away to fight to the death in a foreign land because a whole lot of people around them, adults they trusted, said they should. They had no idea whatsoever about the thing they were getting into.

And, of course, I knew of some who never came back. My grandmother’s closest neighbor and friend, Mrs. G., allowed her 17-year-old son to sign up because he begged and pleaded and promised that he would get into the signal corps and stay out of the real fighting. He got only a few weeks of training. It was ’43 when he joined up. Canada was desperate for soldiers. They were sent up too young, too fast. He was sent straight to the hottest fighting in Italy in early ’44 and was dead 6 weeks into his combat tour. Mrs. G. never recovered. She went insane, was put in an asylum, and waited out the rest of her life in an emotional state so fragile that loud noises would make her shriek right into the late 1960’s when she finally died, at home, still under psychiatric care.

I could go on. Some of my war stories come from Canadian friends who went south and joined the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.

But enough. The stories all start to sound miserably similar. They stretch out to the crack of doom. We need to get to a point here.

And my point is simply this: We have to stop this insanity. And there is a way.

The way out is to overtly and universally teach kids in their schools to hate war and to resolve that they will find non-violent solutions to their disputes from the time they are in kindergarten on up. And to teach them negotiating skills. And to teach them that everywhere in the world all other human beings are like them inside. Vulnerable. Scared. Hopeful. Coping as best they can. Even the bullies are the same in their quiet, secret thoughts.  

Cliché? You bet it is. It’s just never seriously been tried. Naïve, the cynics say. I say otherwise. We’ll do this and do it right or we won’t anything.

We live in a time when another full-out war between the superpowers could end human life on this planet in less than six months. Three quarters of the human race could die in an afternoon. The rest from radiation, starvation, disease, and so on over the next four or five months.

However, we also live in a time when communication with any other human individual or group anywhere on earth is possible for all of us at anytime. We really could write a world Social Studies course that would teach the simple lessons of peace to all kids, kindergarten on up, and we could require all the nations of the world to put it into the curricula that they teach to their young.

Enforcement would be by social pressure, or as consensus of the world grew, by economic sanctions. In short, it really could work. No one would want to openly argue against the measure. To do so would draw the wrath of the vast majority of the rest of the world. The curriculum could be promoted on social media and on television. And so on. It really could work. 

If I sound like a dreamer to you, then I have every right to rejoin …what do you suggest? We have done war over and over for as long as humans have been human. I know that. But what is different today is that we now have the weapons to do it one final time. Absolutely final time. And we will if we do nothing but pray and meditate and hope for the best. Saving our species is going to take more.

We cannot sit, as individuals or as complacent groups, in our social fortresses on our social islands. The evidence of history shows unequivocally that if you try to ignore the nastiness in the world and hope it will all go away, it will not only not go away, it will come for you. As Obama said, the brutes of the world are not going to go away because we close our eyes and sing a particularly touching rendition of “Kumbaya”.

I say we need to do more than pray and meditate and hope for the best. The Brits did that in the interwar years. Where did it get them? We must start to put in place measures that will stop the warmongers from occurring. Peace education in the schools. Everywhere on earth for all kids.   

Yes, there will always be differences and disputes between humans. No, they do not have to end in violence. We can teach the kids that democracy and rule of law offer a better way.

Therefore, all other issues involving men and women, black and white, Asian, Caucasian, African, Indigenous, gay, straight and so on can be put under this one giant umbrella. Peace Ed.. If we make that our prime goal, the rest will follow.

At the core of our peace curriculum will be this guiding principle that all the children of the world will learn: all forms of unfairness and persecution have in common the simple fact that they are not just hurtful, they’re stupid. The strongest society will always be the one that contains as many different kinds of people with as many varied knowledge and skill sets as we can produce.

In a universe that evolves in unpredictable ways, pluralism is the best gamble. It maximizes our chances of surviving. Racism, homophobia, sexism, and so on are the opposite. They are bad gambles because they diminish our talent pool.    

We’ll teach the kids, all the kids: let your neighbor be. As long as he/she is not directly harming you, let him/her be. Negotiate in all disputes. Or at most, let the law handle it. When you get used to the other person’s ways, even the ones that used to make you nervous, you might even find it easy to just be nice.

Spend your energy on the improvement of your own knowledge, talents, and character, not on ridiculing others. Love your neighbor. Work for your living.

If it’s truly necessary, defend those whom you can see are not able to stand up for themselves. Just remember that the objective is always to achieve fairness in your town, not promote one race or one creed over all others, or any other promotion of one slice of humanity over its competitors, and that goes for men and women, gay and straight, black and white, etc.. Open free markets of goods, services, and ideas and if all else fails, the rule of laws written and amended by elected officials from within your own ranks.  

Live and let live. Officially, overtly, and publicly. 

Do not withdraw from the troubles of the world and hope they will all go away. That withdrawing is just what the bullies of the world love. It makes their path to power so easy.

Our days of declining to say what we really think and placidly hoping for the best are over. So is fighting to solve our disputes. They both must end or they will end us. World democracy is the third way, the way out.  

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a decent day. 

                                            United Nations building, New York City, U.S.A. 

                                                   (credit: Neptuul, via Wikimedia Commons)