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Around the globe annually, at 11 am on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we mark with two-minutes of silence memory of the heroes who paid the ultimate price to protect our political freedom. We celebrate our men and women who returned from war along with all who lost their lives in too many conflicts–whose sacrifice sought to assure our freedoms.
It was their courage that provided opportunity to make a society that seeks respect and wellbeing for all citizens. Their sacrifice was for us to take the practical initiatives required to strengthen key values of western civilization like honesty, justice, temperance, and wisdom.
This is most understood among peoples who have experienced the atrocities of an invading force or the threat of invasion. The former president of Smith College, Jill Ker Conway, growing up on her parents' farm west of Sydney in Australia, is among many who describe vividly the wartime experience.
In her book The Road from Coorain, she writes of her own times during World War II as a child, when she was thought to be asleep, overhearing her parents long into the night at the kitchen table discussing the day's news–and what they would do when the country was invaded.
She overheard that her father planned to pack belongings, take his rifle, and put the family onto horses, and they would ride far into the mountains. Knowing the reported brutality of the invading soldiers who would eventually catch up to the family, the plan was that he would shoot his wife and children before shooting himself, to avoid the alternative.
Such expectations and experiences as these were still spoken about periodically when growing up in the 1950s through the 1960s and beyond by adults–with children out of sight, but some still within hearing, reminding everyone of the loss of loved ones in the ferocious fighting of that war in the Pacific.
Then for adults, youth, and children, the persistent blights of wars in Korea and Vietnam so near weighed heavily and long in the awareness of many in South-East Asia.
Recent or not so recent, history can be brutal when its lessons are ignored.