Remembering
Like most Canadians, Remembrance Day makes me reflect on the courageous men and women who have served in the military, fought for our country and fought for the kind of world we want to live in. I’m thinking of the risks they endured, the sacrifices they made, and the lives that were given in the two World Wars and numerous other peacekeeping and combat missions. We must also remember the civilian casualties of armed conflict — those who did not choose to die, but had death imposed upon them. Our recollections serve as a constant reminder that we must work harder to reach the point of “Never Again” — to avoid war and conflict, foster peace, and to encourage harmony.
My great-grandfather was a WWII veteran, and my grandfather spent his career in the Royal Canadian Air Force. I’m thinking of them, and the many others who gave up so much for what they believed in. Looking to the future, I’m hoping our generation can muster even a small part of their courage in responding to the grave threats that face us today — specifically, the crisis of climate change, but also the numerous armed conflicts and abuses of power that happen every day, in every corner of our globe. They unwaveringly believed our world is worth saving, and so should we. Over 100,000 Canadians have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country and our world, and we owe it to them to rise to the challenges we face today.
maybe choose a different poppy image, the one you have is strangely evocative of what many of those 100,000 must have thought they were fighting; although a deeper view of euro/amero-based wars ’til today does yield at root a conflation of ugly motives, so keeping the image is probably unintentionally ironic that way … but why be unwitting?
an anecdote comes to mind: our neighbourhood has many elderly residents who lived through the most unspeakable of horrors that the swastika was a banner for, and when some next-door sweet Hindu neighours a few years ago acquired a new car, they decorated it prominently with their benign version of a swastika, but erased it when told of the possible offence taken at misperception in this neighbourhood, they really had not been aware of, or of the extent of, that at particular occidental imagic perversion
It’s from the Canadian Legion website.
whatever its source, it’s a bad one, poppies in our garden bear absolutely no resemblance to wheels, blades, fans, or you-know-what, they rather look drunken before they twist to opening in exquisiteness, a metaphor for creativity excluding an evocation of mechanism, stupid choice by the Legion