Hoping for Peace

November 11th is still an official holiday in Western Canada, so our whole family is off work and school for the day. But on November 10th, my kids’ school had a Remembrance Day assembly. I have attended this event every one of the five years that I’ve had kids attending this school, and I have to say that some years have been more moving than others, but this year was one of the most moving I’ve been to yet.

The first thing that struck me was the slideshow that was playing as we entered the gymnasium (as an aside: remember the old days when the peak of high-tech was a teacher writing the lyrics to songs with fine point marker on an acetate sheet on the overhead projector?). The images of young people – fresh, shining, earnest – flashed up on the screen one by one, and one by one, they vanished, lost to our sight as they themselves have been lost to their families. My friend, sitting beside me echoed my thoughts as she muttered: “it’s wrong. It’s just wrong.”

But after that tribute to Canada’s fallen soldiers, the focus of the assembly moved in a direction I could really get behind: peace. The choir sang songs calling for peace, and to close the assembly, the entire student body rose and sang a song whose chorus had the best message of all:

Hope for peace, for children everywhere.

And that’s it, really, isn’t it? Those young people who lost their lives and whose deaths seemed so wrong and meaningless to my friend and I, they were, nonetheless adults, who made their own choices. But as I looked around the auditorium at all these little children; these safe, free children, I thought about their counterparts in all the world’s conflict zones. Children who have no power. Who have not chosen to be where they are. Who are innocent.

At dinnertime, after telling their Daddy about the day’s events, and the emphasis on peace, he mentioned the existence of a white poppy symbolizing peace.
 
He admitted to not knowing much about it, so I took it upon myself to investigate, and came across this British organization, the Peace Pledge Union. Here is their description of the white poppy movement:

The White Poppy symbolises the
belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than killing
strangers. Our work, primarily educational, draws attention to many of
our social values and habits which make continuing violence a likely
outcome.

From economic reliance on arms sales (Britain is the
world’s second largest arms exporter) to maintaining manifestly useless
nuclear weapons Britain contributes significantly to international
instability. The outcome of the recent military adventures highlights
their ineffectiveness in today’s complex world.

Now 90 years after the end of the ‘war to end all wars’ we still have a
long way to go to put an end to a social institution, which in the last
decade alone killed over 10 million children.

TEN MILLION CHILDREN. And as my children sang their songs at the table for their Dad, I joined them in their wish. Silently, wordlessly hoping for peace. For the children. Everywhere.