Kaiven@0xkaiven
Remembrance Day
Today, we pause in the stillness of our own freedoms and remember those who never tasted theirs. Barely grown men, and boys not yet steady in their stride, marched into the mouth of war with nothing but courage in their chests and the hope of a better world held tight against their hearts.
They lay in foreign fields beneath indifferent skies. They wrote trembling letters home that would never be answered. Their mothers wept into uniforms folded too neatly. Their fathers stood silent in doorways, aged decades in a single heartbeat. And the world, drenched in their blood, was handed back to us… cleaner, quieter, freer.
We promised them something. We promised that their sacrifice would not be forgotten; that the liberties bought with their youth would never be bargained away; that the horrors they endured would be the inheritance we refused to pass on.
Yet today, we watch freedoms erode by whispers and signatures, by fear and convenience. Rights once defended by courage are surrendered by apathy. Voices once raised in the trenches are drowned out by the polite silence of those afraid to offend.
So stand. Stand in gratitude, not comfort. Stand in remembrance, not ritual. Stand for the freedoms carved into the soil of Flanders and Normandy, in the sands of Gallipoli, and the icy air of Korea.
We owe them more than poppies pinned to our lapels.
We owe them vigilance.
May the young who never grew old be honoured not only with silence, but with action. With courage. With the defence of the rights they died believing we deserved.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them.
