More people will pay attention to Remembrance Day this year than usually might. The murder a few weeks ago of Corporal Nathan Cirillo, and to a lesser extent, the murder of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, are enough to remind a few more of the memorial day for those who have died in military service. The rest will wear a poppy in their lapels or come out to the parade because this is the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War.
Thirty-odd years ago, you wouldn’t have seen this level of interest. The passage of years since the end of the Korean War made military things too distant from most people’s lives to have a personal impact. And for many others, the anti-American, anti-war views that came as a reaction to the Cold War kept them not merely indifferent to Remembrance Day but openly hostile to anything that smacked of positive feeling toward anything and anyone connected to the military.
That changed with the end of the Cold War. Within a year after the Berlin Wall was gone, Canada was at war in the Gulf. Through the rest of the 1990s, Canadians took on increasingly difficult and dangerous jobs in places like Bosnia and Croatia. As the dangers of war service became more personal to Canadians, so too did their interest in in commemorations like Remembrance Day.
