The emotional weight of those crimson flowers pinned to coats and sweaters is much heavier this a... The meaning of the poppy..

No longer is the poppy primarily a historical reference, a tribute to those who secured our values with their own blood in the long-ago wars of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.

Now the fallen are joined by people who are sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, moms and dads. Afghanistan has made Remembrance Day painfully contemporary again.

We as a nation grimly watch, and grapple with our emotions, as the front pages and the newscasts depict a stream of flag-draped caskets carrying our fallen soldiers back home to Canada.

New generations, familiar with the name Kandahar, share a wrenching appreciation for the very same sorrow and loss suffered by families who winced at the sound of places called Vimy or Dieppe or Ortona or Korea.

The soldier killed by a suicide bomber in Panjwaii district is decades removed from the trenches of the Somme, or the convoys of the North Atlantic, or the crews who never returned from bomber raids into the deadly night skies over Nazi Germany.

But their different eras don't matter. They all share the same exclusive significance, a special place in the soul of a country. Their commitment and sacrifice are what we want the world to think, when they think of what it means to be Canadian.

Today, many Canadians will watch the wreaths being laid at cenotaphs and monuments across the country. We will bow our heads in respect to people we never personally knew, and mourn the lives they never got to realize.

And many of us will curse the hell that war is, and shake our heads in anger at that foible of the human condition that condemns us as a race to take up arms against each other. We will wonder why we never learn, or why politicians make the decisions they make.

Remembrance Day is not about glorifying or justifying or defending war. It is about cherishing what we have as Canadians, and sincerely celebrating and honouring the people who made decisions based on what they believed in, and went into danger at the request of their country.

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