For the last ten years or so of my teaching, I arranged the Remembrance Day services at our high school, when dwindling numbers of WWII vets would come and be cheered by the interest the students demonstrated on that day. Remembrance Day posters and samples of student work assigned by teachers would decorate the halls and the gymnasium. Our huge Styrofoam cenotaph cross, made by a former Industrial Arts teacher, would have been hauled out of storage and patched up to take centre spot on the stage. Following each of two services, students would come onto the stage and be allowed to stick their poppies into the foam, their own little gesture of remembrance.

Very few of them knew a lot about the wars. Obsessed as we have been over the last decades with getting “Canadian content” into our history, the war years have tended to fall into a chapter of history texts that teachers struggled to get covered in the spring, following a year’s march through the course that left birch bark canoes, “coureurs-de-bois”, John Cabot, and Wolfe & Montcalm scattered along the path. Certainly a whole course could be taught on any week of one of the wars—try to cover it all in a hurried chapter in spring.

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Few people doubt that we are fortunate people here in Canada, and in North America in general. One aspect of protecting this undeserved good fortune has been that we have wide oceans that lap our shoreline and keep us isolated from the rest of the world. Although events like 9-11 have poked holes in that ocean-insulated security, we still manage to spend most of our lives oblivious to what is going on in the rest of the globe, or at least insulated enough that we can pass off any concerns aroused by disturbing newscasts with the comfort of a “Good thing we don’t live there!” kind of thought.

We don’t seem to realize the full extent of our wealth and good fortune. I suspect that if we did a little survey, many Canadians would indicate a belief that we have about as much wealth as most people in the world, but allow that we have certainly more than that unfortunate group of poor people in the “disadvantaged” countries.

The fact is, we are very well off, even the less fortunate of us, in comparison to most of the world around us. North Americans number only 5% of the world population, and together with another 5% from Europe, this 10% has for decades been in the unique situation of having more than the vast majority of people in the world, while we have used up much of the resources of the world, and polluted more than most in the world (China is rapidly moving into the lead in the area of pollution, largely in its rampant industrialism that caters to our insatiable need for goods).

In Canada, social scientists and government agencies have set a current “poverty line” at about $25,000 a year family income. That’s quite a bit more than the vast majority of the world has at its disposal. An interesting web site called “globalrichlist.com” allows you to compare your family income to the rest of the world. A family income of $25,000 puts you close to being in the richest 10% of the world (10.6 % actually). That’s our poverty line, and almost 90% of the world doesn’t meet it! A family income of $50,000 a year places you with only 1.78% of the world’s financial elite… in other words, 98.22% of the people in world have less income than you do. If we run things up a little further, if you are fortunate enough to have a family income of $100,000 a year, you would be in a group of less than one percent of the people of the world, with more than 99% of the world having less money than you. Your group would measure only 44 million people in a world of 6,600 million+, and you are in there with Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Oprah. I hope you feel special.

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OK, we just manage to get comfortable with getting our tongues around the name Osama bin Laden, and suddenly to be able to talk intelligently about world affairs, we have to learn to say “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad” (or various other spellings, like “Amadinejhad”). The always opinionated, sometimes dangerously scarey Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, just finished his hurried, but highly unappreciated visit to the United States, culminating with a protested appearance at Columbia University.

The university committee that invited him to speak felt that everyone has a right to be heard and debated, no matter how far off the mark his or her view of the world seems to be– certainly a noble aim for a university, but they didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet when Columbia President Lee Bollinger introduced the guest speaker by calling him every name in the book, including “astonishingly uneducated” and a “petty, cruel dictator”.

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