As we approach Remembrance Day this Nov. 11 it's in a war-torn world.
Conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Sudan continue unabated as thousands upon thousands of everyday people have their lives uprooted and destroyed — and in the worst case, taken from them entirely. And these are far from the only places around the globe facing deadly internal and external conflicts.
Most of the people caught up in these conflicts just want to live out ordinary lives without the threat of imminent death.
While Remembrance Day is born of war, its message is one of peace: Lest we Forget.
But we seem to be living in a world that is increasingly forgetting. There's a rise in extremism and a disturbing number of people expressing admiration of tyrants, dictators, and authoritarians of various stripes.
Our own political scene in the social media age is too often reduced to soundbites and slogans that cannot hope to express the nuance of important issues, and the nuance of the possible solutions to our most pressing problems.
If there was an easy solution to addiction and homelessness, for example, you can bet that every politician everywhere would be all over it. But there isn't, and we have to be willing to dig into the complexities and messiness that can't be summed up in a meme, campaign ad, candidates debate, or even an hours-long session of the legislature. We didn't get here in a day and we're not going to get out of it that fast either. We have to look at underlying causes like poverty, abuse, loss of community, loss of hope. We have to look at budgets and wealth hoarding by those at the top.
We humans are not simple creatures, no matter how much we like pat answers.
And yet a frightening number of people would rather listen to an authoritarian leader make promises of quick fixes because it's politically expedient than offer real policy and evidence-based treatment for what ails us.
As the past echoes down through the years, all they have to do is choose a villain — often a minority group — that people can turn their frustration, fear and anger upon, and promise to get rid of the problem. Sometimes that's a particular racial group, political group, religious group, 2SLGBTQ+ people, or increasingly, terrifyingly, that's women. What has happened to the women and girls of Afghanistan is nothing short of a grotesque horror, but women's rights are being eroded in far more surprising places that should give us pause.
So this Remembrance Day, as we look to the past, let us consider what kind of world we want, because we seem to have lost sight of the future.
