Friday, November 11, 2011

Be Yours To Hold It High

Remembrance.

Simple - yet, for some, oh so hard.

It's more than a poppy. It's more than a day off of work, or school.

Everything that we have - EVERYTHING - we owe to those brave enough to put on a uniform, to stand in front of the enemy, and to die so that we might live.

Every political quabble we have. Every election - whether we choose to vote, or not. Every difference of opinion across partisan lines. None of these things happens without the bravery and sacrifice - past, present, and future - of our men and women in uniform.

Those whose lives are marked by a simple white gravestone or cross are forever to be remembered as heroes. Those who came home, whether from Germany in 1945 or from Afghanistan in 2010, have sacrificed for us again and again every night, when they close their eyes and relive the horrors they saw while defending the defenceless.

Remember them. All of them.



The video is of a Vancouver men's chorus performing a Stephen Chatman arrangement of the seminal poem "In Flanders' Fields". I have performed this work in the past, and it absolutely rips your guts out to sing it in a room full of Veterans. Powerful.

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