The Grumpy Owl: Remembering Remembrance Day -- Two Days Too Late

It's time to declare Remembrance Day a failure and to do away with it. Having said that, I did buy a poppy. My Nan is in The Legion. I don't mind giving them a couple of bucks; mainly because they provide cheap beer and were the last holdouts against the anti-smoking campaign. But I don't think the poppy works. When one looks around, it's hard to think that Remembrance Day is accomplishing its stated goal of peace through recalling how horrible and pointless war is.

Now it's just another cheap holiday with quasi-fascist overtones. Year after year we are treated to same ridiculous news stories that all the holidays get. For Christmas we get to hear about how it is now apparently illegal to say "Merry Christmas." For Halloween we get the same tired tropes about whether or not it's evil. And for Remembrance Day? Usually the talk radio hosts bitch about immigrants not selling the poppy. Apparently there should be a pogrom of some kind. We should make them celebrate freedom under penalty of law.

But this year, there was a new story. One that I think will catch on. The poppy itself was being criticized because the Taliban funds its efforts against Canadian soldiers by selling opium. In an unintentionally hilarious article in The National Post, Don Martin does not suggest that we buy opium from the farmers, use it for medicine and recreation, thus cutting the Taliban out of the deal and bankrupting them while helping the farmers whose hearts and minds we are attempting to win. No, he suggests a far more logical and realistic approach. We should find a new symbol. The poppy, he claims, is too ironic. Since everyone has forgotten about WW1 and its sequel WW2 and its survivors are all dropping dead, we should move on and remember what is happening now. We should find a new symbol to commemorate an ongoing conflict.

Although I'm not quite sure how one remembers the present day or if "Remembrance Day" is the appropriate time to forget your past, I too think we should have a symbol for our ongoing conflict with the evil hoards of dirt poor farmers living in some godforsaken hellhole on the other side of the planet. Sadly, the swastika is already taken. The yellow ribbon may be a good idea.

Either way, it's important that we divorce our war symbols from any memory of how terribly vile and completely void of redeeming qualities war is. They should instead be symbols of our support for the troops and for endless war. Then, once the war is over and the troops are dead, we can just forget about them and move on. Their sacrifice should be remembered until the next war or until they return home with no arms. What more can a solider ask? If they didn't want to be immediately cosigned to oblivion --probably before they're even dead-- they wouldn't have joined the army in the first place.

Labels: army, holidays

posted by bobdobbs @ 12:03 PM

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