Interestingly, and yet another line that separates Canadians from our southern neighbours, the war that we can't seem to get over is WWI. It is not overly uncommon to even hear some people my age (mid-30s) refer to it as "the Great War". I couldn't tell you off-hand what battles Canada was involved in in WWII, but the names Dieppe, Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele are tattooed on my brain.
When I grew up hearing about war, it was about muddy, rat infested trenches and friend's corpses left in no man's land because they couldn't be retrieved. It was about gruelling boredom interspersed with abject terror, trench foot, lice, inedible food and "going over the top". It was grim pride in the fact that we did things that no other country had managed no matter how many times they tried, but without ever forgetting for a moment what it had cost. There's no Memorial day in Canada, it's Remembrance Day, renamed from Armistice Day; still commemorated at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month. Needless to say, it's short on picnics but long on tears and ceremony.
Maybe the really scary thing about the cold war and "war on terror" being what occupies your countrypeople's minds is that so few of you have actually been touched by it. 9/11 was a horror, of course, and the country was rocked to its roots, but even with the subsequent war in Iraq, as a culture you are too far away from it. You have not watched every able-bodied young man of a generation walk away for four years. Too few of you are directly involved; too few of you that really understand why "glorious war" is such an oxymoron. You all get fear, you just don't necessarily have the horror embedded in your culture the way some do.
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Date: 2010-01-30 12:11 am (UTC)When I grew up hearing about war, it was about muddy, rat infested trenches and friend's corpses left in no man's land because they couldn't be retrieved. It was about gruelling boredom interspersed with abject terror, trench foot, lice, inedible food and "going over the top". It was grim pride in the fact that we did things that no other country had managed no matter how many times they tried, but without ever forgetting for a moment what it had cost. There's no Memorial day in Canada, it's Remembrance Day, renamed from Armistice Day; still commemorated at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month. Needless to say, it's short on picnics but long on tears and ceremony.
Maybe the really scary thing about the cold war and "war on terror" being what occupies your countrypeople's minds is that so few of you have actually been touched by it. 9/11 was a horror, of course, and the country was rocked to its roots, but even with the subsequent war in Iraq, as a culture you are too far away from it. You have not watched every able-bodied young man of a generation walk away for four years. Too few of you are directly involved; too few of you that really understand why "glorious war" is such an oxymoron. You all get fear, you just don't necessarily have the horror embedded in your culture the way some do.