We owe them everything...
There is a war memorial by the golf course in the Scottish village I grew up in. My village isn't unusual in that regard as most places in Britain have constructed some form of memorial to the people who lived and died to protect the world they inherited. Remembrance Day, or Poppy Day as we referred to it, was a big deal and we just took it for granted that we should quietly remember the who we were told died for us.
Being able to just take certain things for granted can come with all sorts of advantages. Life can be incredibly simple if someone hands you a few basic rules to live by. My childhood contained constant reminders of how lucky I was and I suspect I wasn't the only kid in Scotland in that regard. "Eat you mince..." was always followed by an admonition that a child in Africa could eat for a week off the stuff I left on my plate. Whatever the refrain, essentially being reminded to "Count your blessings" made for a decent basis for a good life.
We don't have to be geniuses to realize that man's capacity for inhumanity to man is pretty impressive and our blessings today are rare in both time and space. The oldest trade in the world isn't prostitution it's slavery. Everyone alive today is descended from someone who was enslaved. Violent totalitarians have been trying for centuries to exert power over the rest of us, whether they were Popes, Kings or the heads of dysfunctional States. Resistance against totalitarians started in England and spread to its colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My views were formed in the late recovery from free people beating back Europeans after that continent's disastrous experiment with socialism in its various inhuman, totalitarian forms.
Freedom is no small thing. By any measure of peacefulness, good health, longevity, education, and material wealth we are now better off than ever before. If you are lucky enough to have been born in the UK or US then you hit the jackpot. Everything we enjoy today, we have because someone before us decided our freedom was worth protecting.
The poppy first became associated with Memorial Day in America in 1915. Moina Michael, a professor at the University of Georgia, was inspired by the poem In Flanders Fields and replied with her own poem:
We cherish too, the Poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led,
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies.
She then conceived of an idea to wear red poppies on Memorial day in honor of those who died serving the nation during war. She was the first to wear one, and sold poppies to her friends and co-workers with the money going to benefit servicemen in need.
The custom spread to Europe and the countries of the British Empire and Commonwealth. In the UK poppies were worn for the first time at the 1921 remembrance anniversary ceremony.
In Flanders Fields was written by Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The poppies in my picture came from a work of installation art placed in the moat of the Tower of London between July and November 2014. Entitled "Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red", the work consisted of 888,246 ceramic red poppies each intended to represent one British or Colonial serviceman killed in the 1914-1918 European War. The title was taken from the first line of a poem by an unknown soldier.
