NOT FAIR

So the usual Sunday night whirlwind. The children went home, leaving the customary trail of Lego, cake crumbs and pencils. One of the boys was still loudly wailing over the latest injustice (losing at noughts and crosses I think) and the other was poking his sister with a plastic light saber, until she grabbed it from him and he burst into tears. As the Intrepids and I stood waving at my sister's car, the cries of 'It's not fair!' echoed down the street.

You know what, I'd love to teach them that life isn't fair. I'd love to show them how it's unreasonable to expect life ever to be anything but unfair and how maturity sort of teaches us how to deal with it. I'd love to point out that people don't complain about unfairness when they end up with the larger slice of cake, but will march furiously back into the shop when they've been short-changed. I'd love to show them how this universal belief in yourself as the centre of the solar system actually makes the world less fair and how there are children dying of ebola and AIDS and hepatitis and starvation every minute of every day because of it.

But of course, they have to find that out themselves don't they? Like the rest of us.

In the last century, Europe erupted into conflict over the big questions of how the world should be run. Ideologies clashed, old empires tumbled at the hands of revolutionaries, and into the terrible vacuum tumbled the crowned nations, the grandchildren of Queen Victoria at war over their grand old allegiances. The Great War bubbled and boiled like a fire that no-one could quench, until after four years, it simmered into a pile of ash, leaving nothing but devastation at its charred and blackened heart.

But out of those ashes, deep in the smouldering embers of the war, evil was already stirring. It's not fair, it whispered through the lips of poverty and despair. We don't deserve this, it said to the proud and disaffected veterans who'd suffered and continued to suffer in the ruins. All that that evil needed was a face and a common enemy, someone to blame and pursue and ultimately, to... exterminate. It soon had both of these things. Before the world could believe its eyes, the fire that was left to die at Versailles had burst into a scorching, flickering ball of flame again. It raged across Europe and in its furious, fascist, flickering face, it consumed millions upon millions of lives burning helplessly, pointlessly and unfairly in its terrible wake.

Today, we remembered the men and the women who fought that unfathomable evil. They arrived before us, and many of them died younger than we can imagine. It wasn't fair for them: they were simply people of a generation who were born for such a time as theirs - and they fought for a future, not of their own, but ours. It is, if anything, grossly unfair that we live in freedom because they died in muddy trenches. It seems tremendously unfair that they can't know the difference that they made and that we can't thank them for it. But it is true and I am so glad that we remember and we honour those incredibly brave soldiers so highly. Not just them, but the men and women who, even today, risk their lives in the face of a different kind of evil, the kind which skulks the desert places of this messed-up world. It's great that we can thank God that there are people still brave enough to do that.

For my nephews, I'd love them to remember the fallen too, but also the importance of standing up to injustice and evil when their time comes. I'd like them to be so brave and so selfless that they can put their families' needs ahead of their own, despite how unfair it all seems to them. I'd like them be so courageous in the face of that inevitable unfairness that they know how to make a better world, not just for them but for their children, their cousins and their grandchildren - and for mine. What's more, I'd like to be like that too, rather than sniping at God about the petty unfairness I see in my own life sometimes.

Somehow, the sea of poppies, the brave and noble minutes of silence and the old boys showing the young boys the true meaning of courage and duty - it makes me hopeful. And thankful... really thankful.