Remembrance Day/Moment’s Silence
Am I wrong in finding Remembrance Day to be hugely insulting to those it claims to honour? It seems kind of patronising having a pointless silence & wearing a pointless poppy thing just so we can all feel patriotic & self righteous whilst the ‘remembered’s grandkids are out killing & dying in the exact same fashion decades later. Seems like we’ve all kind of missed the point – they sacrificed their lives so we wouldnt have to but uh, we’ve been sending our young to kill & be killed every day of every year since – wouldn’t it be a better gesture to the ‘fallen’ if we actually honoured their sacrifice by upholding our promise that this would ‘never happen again’ & by physically resisting sending any more of our kids to invade other peoples countries & have their limbs blown off in the process? “Nah, thats too much like hard work, I’ll buy a poppy instead & I wont feel like a hypocrite at all.” I wrote a song on my (probably isolated) views on the subject & here it is…
Moment’s Silence – By James Kennedy 2010
In this moment’s silence
As the war is raging
Are we remembering
Or just forgetting something more
As the ones for whom they died
Follow in their footsteps
If they could have seen us now
Would they have turned their aim around instead
Paper flowers for sentiments as feeble
Anthems short as our memory
Coffins buried with our broken promise
That the lives they gave us were not in vain ‘cos ‘never again’…
In this moment’s silence
We should be raging
How many times must we
See this drama before we see the truth
That the ‘heroes’ for the flag
As ‘martyrs’ for religion
Are just sacrificial Lambs
For another man’s prize
Paper flowers for sentiments as feeble
Anthems short as our memory
Coffins buried with our broken promise
That the lives they gave us were not in vain ‘cos ‘never again’…
