On Honour
an NIH special report!November 9, 2005
In Canada this is officially the Year of the Veteran. The chief activity during the year of the Veteran so far has been announcing how we all intend to "honour" the veterans. Well, let's see, what kind of honours have veterans been getting?
Veterans (sic) Affairs Canada has provided a list of events for November at which veterans will be honoured (the week before Remembrance Day has been designated Veterans' Week). You will notice that a large percentage of the events scheduled for Veterans' Week are in fact Remembrance Day ceremonies, which actually are occasions for honouring not veterans but the war dead. Edmonton is opening a new veterans' centre, but the most substantial of the remaining events seem to be the museum exhibits. For the rest you have open houses, breakfasts, dinners, coffee breaks, a "ceremonial puck drop," and the like. A Train of Remembrance will carry veterans to Ottawa.
Veterans Affairs has also incorporated among its honours a contribution by Public Works and Government Services Canada, a salute to "the men and women who worked on the home front" – that is, a salute to more people who are not veterans.
Veterans Affairs is also developing a Veterans' Charter which will provide additional benefits to contemporary veterans. If one were cynical (and believe me, we at NEW IMPROVED HEAD are not cynical; we are in fact incorrigibly optimistic about human nature, which means that the repeated dashing of our hopes sometimes makes us a bit bitter but never diminishes our abundant optimism), as I was saying, if one were cynical one might see in the Charter an attempt by Veterans Affairs Canada to reduce the staff cuts as the veterans of World War II and Korea die off, but as I was also saying one is not cynical here. The veterans who have already retired since Korea may be a bit cynical, though.
For the most part, "honouring" the Veterans seems to boil down to little more than another government-sponsored opportunity to feel good. That's probably about all we're willing to put into a tribute to veterans, anyway. Anything else might raise our taxes, and raising taxes now has the status in society formerly accorded the sin against the Holy Ghost. Perhaps Veterans Affairs' seemingly halfhearted approach was shrewdly calculated to get veterans as much attention as we are prepared to give them and to use our resultant happy thoughts about veterans as leverage for their Veterans Charter which will provide a few more benefits for future veterans.
Perhaps the best way we could honour the veterans is to work to ensure that there will be no more of those future veterans than necessary.
On Honour © John FitzGerald, 2005
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