“Where Have All The Flowers Gone? Long Time Passing (and) When Will We Ever Learn”
Posted by Doug Draper on Niagara At Large
November 11th, 2020
Few songs have touched more movingly on the tragedy of war than this one, written by the late great American folksinger and activist Pete Seeger. Click on the screen below to listen and watch one of literally thousands of performances of ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone’ –
In 2018, in the last municipal elections across Niagara , less than 50 per cent and in some cases, including St. Catharines, Niagara Falls and Welland, less than 40 per cent of eligible voters actually bothered to vote.
That same year, in a provincial election that saw Doug Ford and his Tories win a majority number of seats – enough to allow him to run Ontario like a virtual dictator – the total voter turnout was about 57 per cent, with Ford’s Tories receiving only 40 per cent of those votes.
The First World War memorial in Welland, Ontario’s Chippawa Park. File Photo by Doug Draper
Wearing a poppy for a few days each November is nice, but it is far from enough.
And it is only empty tokenism if so few people in our municipalities and province do not participating in the democratic process.
That is no way to honour those who served and sacrificed in past wars, let alone those who are serving now.
We face many challenges in this greater Niagara Region, and in the provinces and states we live in on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.
Please make a pledge to get more involved in your communities and in the democratic systems we are blessed with, thanks to those who fought and died for them.
Lest We Forget
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Doug Draper, Niagara At Large
NIAGARA AT LARGE Encourages You To Join The Conversation By Sharing Your Views On This Post In The Space Following The Bernie Sanders Quote Below.
