THE EDITOR, Sir:
THIS PAST week, the world solemnly paid tribute to the various nations, their generals and troops, who were instrumental in liberating Europe from the Nazi oppression.
It was a sacrificial effort in which many citizens and soldiers alike gave up their lives so that the rest of us could live ours in freedom from want and slavery.
We might have expected that such ultimate selflessness might have conferred upon our societies the wisdom to truly value life and liberty.
Unfortunately, in the years following World War II, much of Europe turned its back on its hard-won freedom and voluntarily succumbed to a new 'dictatorship of relativism' that is no less evil than the fascism that preceded it.
This new tyranny recognises nothing as being definitive and its ultimate goal consists solely of satiating one's own ego and desires. We have seen the contemporary results nihilistic yet impeccably democratic
legislation that repudiates life itself!
Did those who come before us die, just so that we could negate the very lives they gave up, by our legaliasation of various drugs, prostitution, homosexuality, contraception, same-sex marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, abortion and euthanasia?
Once a year, we pay homage to those who served and especially those who have fallen, but do we really understand what it means to keep the faith or to take the torch from failing hands?
That we dishonour those who gave their lives for ours, can only be understood by seeing that their faith the faith we are asked to keep and nurture was in life itself and its sanctity and beauty; their giving of their most precious gifts, their own lives, can only be justified if we too keep that faith, that torch.
Otherwise, we negate their lives and ours. They become the Wasted Dead and we fare no better in the grand scheme.
We can only redeem the losses of our war dead if we act to redeem our betrayal of life in all its forms.
I am, etc.,
PAUL KOKOSKI
paulkokoski@mountain cable.net
234 Columbia Drive
Hamilton, Ontario
Canada
Via Go-Jamaica
