It is a particular, deliberate thing to commemorate the fallen, in our modern digitized worlds. The lights on our screens not only distract us, but fill our minds with images that before required actual experience or imagination to contemplate, relieving us of the requirement to do and think. Within the bounds of our glassed-over eyes, behind the rim of optics, our minds’ capacity to feel the deep pain and horror of memory is overwhelmed. Liquid modernity is real; we cannot hold our shapes as Western societies. Unlimited options mean lack of boundaries, boundaries of communities in which we formed connections to our past, without which we struggle to know ourselves. Alienation is born of our context collapse. The deliberate nature of Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom and Canada is a stab against the veil of forgetting, to let the haunting specters of national memory infest the temples of our being.
We need our ghosts.
On the Second of May, 1915, forty-two-year-old John McCrae lost his young protégé, the twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, in the Second Battle of Ypres. The loss of his friend compelled his hand to write the poem that defined the war. His words named our muted truths that we are the dead, our lost are us and we are them. We cannot know ourselves without the relationships that define us, and being deprived of meaningful relationships and contact and memory erases not just the past but who we are and can become.
In Flanders fields, the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
In Flanders Fields, published 1915 — by Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, Canadian Expeditionary Force
Today, before a presentation by one of my students about our research and trip to Normandy as part of the 2025 Class of the Normandy Institute, of course, poppies came up, and I was told by one of our heads of school that, in gifted-education circles, a poppy is an analogy for a student. The idea is that a student who develops faster and differently than the rest needs special tending, and, like poppies, they can be conspicuous and delicate, needing the right conditions to thrive. And, cases of bad care or limited educational perspective, it can be easier to cut down tall poppies to keep the field even rather than allow the landscape to beautify with difference. This also seems like a reasonable approximation of the burden of grand histories and pressures that come with them. And like a suppressed gifted student, societies that repress the histories that make them special have been harmed.
But these histories made us into great societies that are the envy of the world. It is no coincidence that, after two centuries of global domination, first by the British Empire and then by the United States, Britain’s first wayward colony, we are beginning to slip from our places in the sun as we suffer from amnesia and context collapse. Those jealous of our achievements can feel a need to cut us down, and conscious of position we may be tempted to self-denigrate rather than acknowledge both our gifts and burdens.
Yet the poppies in the fields of Flanders demand that we acknowledge them.
In the United Kingdom, Remembrance Sunday began in 1939 so that their already generation-old, November 11 commemorations would not interfere with wartime production. The British continued the additional tradition of memorialization on the nearest Sunday to November 11, which in 2025 was November 9.
Earlier in the United States, Congress recommended to President Calvin Coolidge that he issue a proclamation in 1926 to establish an anniversary of remembrance:
Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and
Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and
Whereas the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), that the President of the United States is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.
—June 4, 1926, United States Congress joint resolution commemorating the end of the Great War
Back during that time of more confident civic religion, it was not seen as an imposition for Congress to invite schools and churches to join in with “appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.” What could be more neighborly? The siloing of faith has only provoked a backlash of particularism, an ugly segmenting of society. Would we not rather have a confident, context-rich celebration of heritage and history that enlivens those in proximity?
Likewise, too many of our school systems use the day as an extra day off. It would be one thing to close the school and replace it with commemoration ceremonies in the buildings, but instead it is treated as a holiday from work and education. The true spirit of the proclamation would be for Veterans Day to be an instructional day with a special curriculum and activities built around the First World War and America’s other wars so that children would each year be reminded, in detail, that freedom is not free. More engagement would also allow immigrant children to participate in America’s story and begin to feel themselves more at home, generating better inclusion through context immersion. As an educator, I have seen how those kinds of activities become memories the students bond over and recall as they grow up.
Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, doctor, soldier, and poet, rose to the same rank as his father before him. He did not return to his native Guelph in Ontario, Canada. He died in the war, one of many casualties of illness, contracting pneumonia while commanding a Canadian General Hospital at Boulogne. He died January 28, 1918, and was buried in Wimereux Communal Cemetery in France. He died for king and country, and lived tending the wounded, healing the sick, and promoting the memory of his fallen friends and comrades-in-arms, until he joined them and became one of the dead.
To acknowledge him and the story of all our veterans, those who fell and those who returned home to friends and family, is a deliberate act of defiance in an age of forgetting. It is an act of rebuilding connections and community and an invitation to join the work of transmission in our schools, our churches, our public squares, and to make Veterans Day, Remembrance Day, and Remembrance Sunday what they were meant to be: not days off, but days on, when we deliberately gather and remind ourselves that our communities were worth fighting for. And still are.
A beautiful article of Remembrance and November 11..