Editorial

Remembering, reflecting

The Remembrance Day ceremony is an interesting and valuable community institution. It tends to provoke solemn reflection, something Albertans are not noted for in normal daily life.
For one thing, we contemplate the shortened lives of those Canadians who answered the call to arms in the various wars and paid the ultimate price. Remembering and honouring them is the ostensible purpose of the ceremonies held each year at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. But there’s much more to it.
The Slave Lake ceremony is notable – and thus all the more effective – for its brevity. It lasts all of 20 minutes – from a quick march of police and cadets to the moment of silence to the laying of wreaths. It is simple, elegant and profound.
There is a mood of reverence quite evident in the crowd for these few minutes. One can sense that people are thinking seriously about serious things – such as why human beings have always made war on each other, and why we should stop doing it.
The riddle of human relations and the role of war in them is, of course, a hugely complicated one for which there are no easy answers. But there are signs that we are figuring some things out.
Once, any ceremony honouring the war dead would have also glorified war itself. Thus were societies organized, to ensure the next crop of soldiers was ready to take up the sword or the rifle.
Somehow we’ve managed to move away from that martial attitude, while maintaining our ability to honour those who gave their lives for king and country. We recognize that although going to war may sometimes be unavoidable, it is never, ever something to be happy about. We can honour individual courage, duty to country and such virtues at the same time as deploring destructive human conflict. This seems a better way of looking at it.
We also reflect that such high ground regarding war is easy for us to occupy, living in a land of peace and prosperity. For other people in other lands, the moral choices are dreadfully complicated. We think of them on Remembrance Day too.
There were probably a couple of hundred people at the Slave Lake Remembrance Day ceremony on Friday. For those brief moments they shared a certain unspoken kinship, about which not a word needed to be spoken.

Satellite community?
There’s a strange contradiction in the status of Slave Lake. On one hand, it’s developing rapidly as a regional centre along similar lines as Peace River, Grande Prairie and Ft. McMurray. On the other hand, it’s still being treated as a remote satellite community.
People come here from communities all around to do their shopping. But where medical services are concerned, Slave Lake is still in the boondocks. Westlock is the hub and we’re the satellite, in spite of having twice the population and probably four times the growth rate.
Nothing against Westlock, but the Aspen Regional Health Authority should maybe look at current reality and future probability when deciding where to locate certain services. When Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire went looking for the likeliest place to locate new stores in north central Alberta, did they choose Westlock? Barrhead? Athabasca? No, they chose Slave Lake.
Where is Tolko’s new $250 million mill going? Slave Lake. Which town is going to reach 10,000 population first, Westlock or Slave Lake?
The future belongs to Slave Lake and it will become increasingly absurd to have this community regarded as a satellite of Westlock for medical or any other services.