On this Remembrance Day, two episodes come to mind. I made my donation to receive a poppy and the elderly veteran who pinned it on my collar thanked me. We should be thanking him for what he did for us.

At the request of one of my students, I ended today’s class at 10:45, rather than 11, so we could attend the Remembrance Day ceremony at UTSC. We spent the class discussing Errol Morris’s brilliant documentary The Fog of War, which focuses on Robert McNamara’s ambivalent reflections about the Vietnam War and, as Secretary of Defense at the time, his responsibility for it. After a morning of sitting and thinking and talking about war, it was appropriate to stand silently to pay our respects to those who fell.