Marking the anniversaries of important world events isn't just about paying tribute to the bravery of soldiers who fought against Nazi oppression or stood in front of Chinese tanks, although that's pretty important.
The Canadians who landed in France on D-Day 70 years ago last week deserve our endless thanks and so do the students who demanded freedom 25 years ago in Tiananmen Square.
The Canadians, as part of the Allied forces, were eventually successful but at a steep cost. As the Dutch residents taking part in the tulip commemoration ceremony Saturday at the Cenotaph pointed out, there was so little to eat that Canadian soldiers were going hungry because they were sharing so many of their rations with the starving population in the Netherlands. By the time the country was freed in early 1945, nearly 1,500 Canadians were dead and almost 5,000 more were wounded.
Bill Zwiers told Citizen reporter Arthur Williams that looking at tulips makes him gag to this day, because supper during the winter of 1944-45 was often tulip bulbs fried in butter or oil.
The outcome was even more tragic in Tiananmen Square in 1989, because the struggle and the suffering by the student protesters did not bring about regime change and freedom. The authoritarian Communist regime remains intact and freely clamped down last week on anyone who wanted to draw attention to June 4, 1989. To this day, most of the Chinese population knows nothing about what happened on that day in Beijing. Even for those of us in Western democracies, we know little about how many died and were hurt the day the tanks and the soldiers cleared the square.
Paying respects is only part of the value, however, of marking anniversaries like D-Day and Tiananmen Square. Even more important, local residents must recognize that we are connected to our fellow human beings around the world, both in 2014 but also in the more recent past of 1989 and even in the more distant past of 1944.
That connection didn't begin the moment Twitter and Facebook came on the scene, or even with the World Wide Web or satellite television or long-distance phone lines. Those are just forms of communications technology that have made it easier to feel the connection with individuals around the world, but the actual link was always there. In fact, it seems the easier it gets to see and hear what is happening in other parts of the world, the less connected we feel to Ukraine, Syria and Central Africa.
That's because stories and images and video and Facebook posts and Tweets from these parts of the world get caught up in the same data stream that features discussion about LeBron James having a cramp, Kim and Kanye getting married and other distracting bits of nonsense. The distractions are more entertaining, more fun and for less depressing.
Even if Chinese students had been posting videos to YouTube of the tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square and the soldiers shooting anyone who stood in their way, Tweeting about the massacre from start to finish, the outcome would have been no different.
In a time with less noise and fewer distractions, war and oppression in distant countries were still important, because it spoke to our values and our desire to do what was right. Even without the full picture, those Canadians could imagine what was going on and they refused to stand by idly.
This isn't to say that Canada and Canadians should go back to intervening in every single problem around the world, trying to fix things and only making them worse. Before we get to that debate, we need to start with actually caring about the world's problems again to the point that we'd actually want to do something to address them.
Instead, we live in a time where the tragic events in other communities and other countries are simply one of the streams in an endless array of entertainment options available on our electronic devices. Neil Postman wrote 30 years ago that we were amusing ourselves to death and was dismissed by many at the time as a left-wing Luddite.
How right he was.
Yet there's hope that these anniversaries will make us remind us that each of us plays a small role to play in a much bigger world, rather than a world simply here to provide the soundtrack and backdrop to our precious, shallow existence.
