Headmaster's Bulletin- (35)

Monday’s junior and senior assemblies both prepared the ground for our acts of remembrance on Tuesday, reminding us all of the horror of war and the spectacular and crass waste of human life in the last century’s major conflicts.

Each one of those hundreds of thousands of lives was infinitely precious to the parents, the children and the partners who loved and cherished them – and the aching pain caused by the ‘premature’ death of a family member never completely goes away.

Statistics all too often depersonalise death. We risk making naive comparisons which trivialise and cheapen life, such as: “We only lost seven men in that attack.” News media bring the immediacy of slaughter into our living rooms, yet it’s frighteningly too easy to feel detached from the horrific effects of a suicide bombing which has just happened on the other side of the world. And so we go on busily living our own lives – and so we should. But:

“Lest we forget”, Remembrance Day should make us all the more determined: to value the sanctity of each human life, wherever in the world; to play our part in resolving conflicts in our daily lives; to be a force for good in our relationships with others; and to bring peace and reconciliation to our families, to our schools and to our communities. That healing process should be part of education, but fundamentally it starts with you and me.