Remembrance Sunday
November 12th, 2006 by 
gddik
Attended the service of remembrance at the local cenotaph this morning, as I try to do every year.
As an atheist, the religious aspect of the service was somewhat lost on me. Nonetheless, I always find it an emotionally difficult event, and just looking at the names on the cenotaph is very poignant. Few of my generation (baby boomer) and more recent ones have had to answer the call as those men and women did. Even though I am fundamentally opposed to warfare, I have the utmost respect for those that did, and laid down their lives so selflessly.
It was good, then, to see how many people - not all old people who remember the conflicts first hand - were there. If anything, there were more people at the service than in recent years.
Even now, though, despite the weasel words of leaders the world over, it seems that no lessons have been learned, and the slaughter continues unabated. Perhaps if people just stopped joining armies, the politicians might find it harder to indulge their power fantasies… Even today, four more UK servicemen were killed in the hell-hole that is Iraq. I must say, I wonder what their deaths will achieve.
Even if the numbers killed these days are smaller, it doesn’t diminish the sacrifice of those that perish, or the suffering of their families.
Posted in Stream of Semi-Consciousness | 
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