During the Second World War, my Dad tried to join the RCAF; but he was frozen in his job as a food supplier to the miners at Britannia, the largest copper mine in the Commonwealth. Janet's Dad did sign up-also Air Force-but he contracted both scarlet fever and diphtheria while in the barracks at Trenton, Ontario; that illness damaged his heart, and changed his classification from 1-A to 4-F. His brother, Art, joined the Canadian Army and went overseas to liberate Europe. During the First World War, two of my Mother's brothers died at Passchendaele. My friend Jim Hnatiuk devoted 25 years of his life to serving in the Canadian Navy, retiring with the rank of CPO-1, then gave up his right to a life of hunting and fishing with his kids for exactly the same reason: to work to preserve freedom and decency.

Every Remembrance Day, I think of the men and women who volunteered to defend our freedom in past wars and I think about the kind of society they risked their lives to preserve.

There are Canadian men and women taking the same risks today in Afghanistan, even as we will gather at the cenotaph November 11, to defend Canada from terrorists training for jihad against the West; but also to give men, women and children there-especially the girls-a decent life.

And I wonder: "What would they think of what Canada has become today? Is this what they risked their lives for?"

The answer isn't encouraging. Most of those brave men and women would turn away in disgust from the lewdness of annual celebrations of sin in our major cities. They would mourn the killing of 110,000 babies every year. They would be repulsed by perverted lyrics and displays of flesh that pass for "entertainment" on MTV.

Where did we go wrong? How did we betray their sacrifice? The answer, I think, is that we have become too timid to oppose evil. We'd rather be "nice". But opposing evil was precisely the reason they risked everything to preserve a decent, moral society for their descendants-for us.

The struggle for free speech and decency can never be resolved in a single conflict. The enemies of true liberty—as opposed to licentiousness—never give up… and we must never give up, either.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep

Though poppies grow

In Flanders Fields.

~"In Flanders Field" by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae