While you dream, all end scene

[sovay]

So now we remember the remembrance, instead of the war itself. Perhaps we should have chosen a different memorial: poppies are the flower of the dead, but also of forgetting, and what with one myth and another they will follow their original function if we are not mindful, which is hard enough to do with the living. Every year I think it's harder. Every year it has to be done.

I feel so restless and un-anchored. We have lived in such an elemental way so long, things here don't look quite right to me somehow; or it may be the consciousness of my so limited time for freedom – so little time to do so many things bewilders me.
—Isaac Rosenberg, 21 September 1917

Comments

[sholio]

I appreciate that most of those who serve in war have no choice about it, but at the same time absolutely hate our country's valorization of the military, and I feel as if the metamorphosis of a commemoration of the end of war, into an occasion to further valorize the act of fighting in war, says a lot about our culture as a nation, none of it good.

[sovay]

and I feel as if the metamorphosis of a commemoration of the end of war, into an occasion to further valorize the act of fighting in war, says a lot about our culture as a nation, none of it good.

Yes. It's the wrong memory.

[brigdh]

I feel as if the metamorphosis of a commemoration of the end of war, into an occasion to further valorize the act of fighting in war

Yes. I was just thinking exactly this thought – I happened to visit Canada over the weekend, and seeing so many people wearing poppy pins struck me strongly.