"Pro Patria Mori": The Fallen Soldier as a Patriotic Martyr
To be honest, I've always had a complex relationship with Remembrance Day. In my head, in a purely intellectual sense, I know that it falls every year on November 11, the anniversary of the official end of WWI, and is meant to be a time of reflection and thankfulness for the servicemen and -women who have fought and died for our country. I also know it to be a time when we pause to reflect on the continued physical, emotional, social and financial needs of our veterans, the oldest of whom have been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, if you were to ask me if that knowledge in my head ever made it down to my heart...hard to say. I suppose there were moments when it must have: like when I finally discovered, as a Grade 8 student, that Canadian forces were deployed in an attempt to defend Hong Kong from the Imperial Japanese during WWII ; or when the brother of a close friend I had in university was a soldier who could potentially be deployed to Afghanistan. But w