BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to a story titled 'Legion official strongly urges people to avoid downtown cenotaph on Remembrance Day' published on Oct. 28.
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We as a society have hit a low point. We have given in and given up in this pandemic when one of the most sacred days of acknowledging the sacrifice of those who gave their lives for our freedom will not be observed publicly.
Remembrance Day has been held through some of the worst flu seasons, like the Hong Kong flu and H1N1 pandemics. It was held when polio-ravaged Canadians and nurses caring for them had to live in isolation. It was held during SARS. We have learned to social distance and to dutifully wear our masks. We are intelligent enough to publicly observe this solemn day.
Just this summer, a small parade was held for Barrie resident Jack Stringer, a veteran, for his 100th birthday! That was one man. He was one of the lucky ones who returned. Can we not do the same for those who did not?
The Canadians who died in Flanders Fields, Vimy Ridge and in the mud of Belgium and France did not give up. During the Second World War the Canadians who fought on the beaches, the seas and the skies did not give up. Nor did the Canadians who fought in Italy, France and Holland. My uncle did not give up and turn back when he faced the German machine-guns that cut him down in a murderous hail of bullets.
Those brave Canadians who volunteered to go to Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan did not give up.
We as Canadians and the loved ones of those who gave everything for us deserve to stand publicly in silence. We need to shiver and feel the wind on our faces that they cannot. We deserve to be at our cenotaphs to shed the tears that blur out their names as we read them. We deserve to hear the holy words that year after year, decade after decade have been repeated but still sound fresh and new.
They handed us a torch with failing hands, but it seems that this year we have thrown it aside and turned our backs.
Robert Ossowski
Barrie
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