Peace Arch Gathering

One Person’s Contrubitrion

There Is No Substitute for Talking In Person

By Eric Lewis

Speech given on March 14^th, 2026, at Peace Arch Park

Thank you very much to all of you who have gathered here. And thanks, as usual, to the organizers of “Peace, Love, and a Handshake,” Haidee Landry and Jeff Smith who make it possible for us to talk to each other — in person. So, we thank them for this rare opportunity to see each other in the flesh, to be able to see the smiles of happiness on each other’s faces, and the half-smiles of concern for things happening in the world today, between us and around the world.

There is no substitute for talking in person. We could have had this discussion on Zoom, over the internet, on Facebook, or other social media. Of course, those forms are artificially mediated in some way where the meanings get changed, the speaker becomes distant, and the truth gets distorted. Rest assured, what I am about to say to you here and now is written only by me – yes, on a computer – but they are my words. Hopefully it will mean more to you than what artificial intelligence would have come up with. I confess that I am often superficial, but I do try not to be artificial.

As some of you know, I am American but was raised in Canada and went to school there. While I was there, I learned a whole lot of non-computer mediated stuff – cursive writing for one. Who remembers that? I remember hanging my coat up in the “cloak room” when I got to school in the morning.

But before I get too nostalgic, rattling off differences between my experience and those of children today — either in Canada or in the United States — I want to say that by no means would I claim that my experiences are superior in some way to those of anyone else, that because I learned cursive writing, or any of the other things I learned makes me any wiser than any of those kids I see protesting I.C.E. in Blaine or anywhere else. Those kids are great! They know bullying when they see it, no matter what anyone tells them. They know murder when they see it.

I would only offer that in the spirit of commemorating the one-year anniversary of “Peace, Love, and a Handshake” between the United States and Canada, I would describe a few more of those experiences — with your permission.

My dad was trained at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa and got his PHD in biophysics there in 1968 before being offered a job teaching physics at the University of Calgary. He had previously been a U.S. Marine right after World War II but had not left the States during his time in. He later served during the Korean War in the Marines, again staying within the confines of the U.S. He told me once that when he was at Camp Pendelton in California with the combat engineer unit that he was assigned, that he had walked over one day to the infantry unit that was scheduled soon to go to Korea to fight. He told the staff NCO there that he wanted to go over with them. The NCO told him gruffly, “You don’t know what you’re asking for. Get the hell out of here.” My dad did so.

I remember in 1968 being told that we were moving from Iowa – a place where my grandma and grandpa and extended family raised corn, cattle, and hogs — to Canada, a land that I knew nothing about and could only imagine. “Would there be Indians there?” I asked my dad. “Oh, yes,” he said.” “Will there be earthquakes?” I asked. He paused and said that he didn’t think so.

1968 was the year that Martin Luther King, junior had been assassinated. I remember watching Bobby Kennedy’s funeral on T.V. It was the year of the Tet offensive in Vietnam. But we crossed the border from Montana to Alberta, and I fell asleep in the back of a blue station wagon, a Rambler as it was called then. And when I woke up we were driving down 9^th Avenue of downtown Calgary. I immediately looked for Indians.

My family and I were Americans in Canada. And we knew other Americans living there. When I went to school in Canada, the Vietnam War was going on. Canada did not officially fight in the Vietnam War. Some individual Canadians did, but as a country, Canada did not. The setting for me at that time made viewing that war in a way different than what children in the United States might have been exposed to. For all I knew after getting there is that I would live the rest of my life in Canada, going to the university of Calgary, learning geology, and becoming a professor like my dad. Even so, the images of the war filtered in towards me as well as other Canadian children. Horrifying images of Vietnamese children injured by napalm, their faces permanently and profoundly disfigured. Regardless of where I lived, these images – all non-computer mediated – reached my eyes. I was horrified and at the same time fascinated. In Canada, it was safe for a child to be fascinated.

Once, my dad told me that one of his reasons for moving to Canada was so that “Uncle Sam would not get his hands on me” given that at that time, there was a military draft. My dad was thinking in the long term of his son’s life and safety.

When the killings of four students at Kent State University by Ohio National Guard members in the United States had happened in 1970, I remember my family – mom, dad, sister, and myself — on a protest march in downtown Calgary one day with many others, Americans and Canadians. Even though I did not know the specific reason for the march at the time, I knew it had to do with the war in Vietnam. I should mention that the Kent State protests were held in the first place because of the expanding war from Vietnam into Cambodia as ordered by President Richard Nixon. A long brutal war, expanding outward.

It was in early 1974, towards the end of the war and at a time that President Nixon and his minions were mired in his Watergate scandal for crimes related to election interference, that I was on a school outing with other kids, being driven to the event by one of my parents, in the back of that same blue Rambler. There were probably eight school kids total in the vehicle – no seat belts on, of course – and the subject of conversation was Americans. One of the kids had said that they hated Americans. The kid didn’t know I was American or that there were two other kids – Sarah and Jamie — in the vehicle who were also American. I immediately spoke up: “It’s not Americans we hate; it’s Nixon.” Sarah vocally agreed. The vehicle went silent for a moment before a new topic was launched upon.

I will fast forward to a moment when I stood in front of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon in April of 1983. The embassy had been bombed by a suicide bomber resulting in the death of 63 people of multiple nationalities, mostly Lebanese and Americans. By this time, I had already returned to the United States and had voluntarily joined the United States Marine Corps. The draft had been eliminated and there was no danger that “Uncle Sam would get his hands on me.” Instead, upon my return to the States in 1982, I leapt enthusiastically into his arms.

And while my dad had been told in 1950 to “get the hell out” of the sight of the Marine infantry NCO heading for an uncertain future in Korea, I was now — by choice — an infantryman. I could not resist the fascination I felt about war and had to find out for myself. And here I was standing in front of a completely mangled building, with other members of my infantry platoon with me standing guard for further attack, while members of the Red Crescent were searching for bodies and heavy equipment was being used to move debris aside. We slept on the sidewalk right across the street from the building, right next to the tent that temporarily housed the bodies of the dead before they were trucked away. There were destroyed vehicles all around. I remember the blast was so hot that a nearby traffic light had melted. While we slept on that sidewalk rotating in our turn to stand guard, I remember the sound of the generator humming throughout the night powering the huge lights that illuminated the wreckage of the blast. Every so often, there would be a call to be silent so that the searchers could hear anyone trapped below the wreckage call for help. No one did.

I actually did sleep that night on that sidewalk next to that tent in front of the embassy, almost calmly, in and out of awareness. After all, was there any other place I needed to be in my life than right there where I was? I really didn’t care at that moment.

I remember the visa section of the embassy – it was the place where many Lebanese died trying to get visas to come to the United States. It was a place indescribably awful in terms of carnage. I can say that I saw a huge piece of meat nearby and was told by a marine officer, “No, that is meat from the deli that was right next to the visa section.” Whatever message the bomber decided to send to the world affected Lebanese as well as Americans, it was not artificially generated. It was very real. And it was a message written in flesh and blood, in a way where human and deli meat could not be differentiated, not artificial in the least.

I watched the newspaper photographers taking photos of the dead. I remember the face of the woman whose husband’s body was being extracted and I remember that buzzing “click” sound cameras made back then, as photos were being snapped of the extraction of her husband’s body. These images would soon be transmitted to the world, the sadness of that woman overshadowed by sensational images filtered by the media’s need to sell newspapers, images that children who see these images, may be fascinated by, such as I was as a child in Canada by images from the Vietnam War. This fascination drives children to seek answers on their own about this thing called war. And that method often includes becoming part of a war, either as someone who turns people into meat or is turned into meat themselves.

That was in Lebanon in 1983. Today, Beirut and Lebanon are again under siege. I saw a photo in The New York Times yesterday showing that exact same sidewalk with a bombed-out vehicle and people sleeping on that same sidewalk — the exact same sidewalk — so that they avoid dying in their buildings from the concrete that would come crashing down on their bodies after an Israeli jet attack. Just to be clear, my grandfather – the father of my father — was a Jew, so I detest and will not tolerate antisemitism. But this is wrong what is happening in Lebanon today.

A generation of men and woman – yes, mostly Americans – may be standing beside you and with you today. They are the generation that went to Iraq and Afghanistan, as marines and as members of other branches of the U.S. military, who for their own reasons, went to war and saw the messages written in flesh and blood. One day, they will recover enough and be able to speak on their own, about their own experiences “over there” rather than have an old man like me try to speak for them, which is, of course, impossible. That would be artificial for me to do so. They must speak for themselves. And they will.

In the meantime, there is another war in the brewing – right now – literally, marine infantrymen and women on ships off the coast of Iran, whose hearts are beating, beating, beating, pounding, POUNDING — before the battle has begun — that will create many more “voices,” unadulterated by artificial intelligence – written in flesh and blood — that we here assembled may be LONG GONE before these people – who were once our children listening to the stories told by old men like me — are ready to speak of their experiences – of taking lives and losing their minds and souls, and yes, their flesh and blood.

AND FOR WHAT? Oil (or worse)? It is certainly not for right and freedom.

The pursuit of peace and love is an ongoing process and will of course never end. When you see a kid who is being exposed to images of war, help them, somehow. The images of ribbons and medals and memorials are deceptive and can cause damage if not explained to a confused kid. I’ll paraphrase Napolean, who once said “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” Don’t let a kid die for a bit of colored ribbon – that most artificial of messages — that he or she thinks might be important to attain.

Incidentally, Napolean, that most cynical of politicians in the early eighteen hundreds, wanted to Make France Great Again. And for his cynicism, he ended his days imprisoned on the Isle of St. Helena off the coast of Africa.

So, I’ll end by again thanking Jeff and Haidee for helping us to see each other directly for the past year — each other’s faces — with no artificial medium to distort our view of each other. Maybe even a handshake. Thank you.