BY MARTIN COULTER
I’m 44 from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Completed collage and attended university for three semesters before realizing a piece of paper on the wall was overrated. Worked in an office before stints with Air Canada and the LCBO. Have lived in Australia while traveling to Papua New Guinea for scuba diving certification. Spent significant time in Britain, Mexico and a glorious week in Israel.
If your gonna walk on thin ice, you might as well dance.
The Poppy is a symbol of hope and courage rather than its profitable cousin which knowingly creates the opioids and the heroine, the flower from Flanders’s is certainly a Gemini. A year ago, we suffered through a cultural objection regarding pucks and sticks and so-called icons. You people witnessed one old man yelling at another to respect our culture, which gave way to one corporation deciding for us that, we as society, had had enough of the shenanigans. That’ll happen when you owe $5Billion to another corporation for the rights to pucks and sticks.
This coming week, our neighbours will decide the fate of the planet and nine-days in November commences, you will hopefully see real icons holding the boxes of plastic replicas. And let us hope you’ll have a crisp 20 in your palm to cough up, a small price for those so-called freedoms we like to yammer on about. The ATM is full of them. The world is full of men and women who gave everything, who will never get the recognition they deserve. Sadly, we are losing them to time. Now, more than ever, we need to remember (like Skidrow) these things we take for granted.
Life is too boring not to try.
The internet is todays cultural appropriation of freedom, “it was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn.” With the amount of hatred and misinformation streaming the globe we often forget that in our everyday lives, we focus on understanding the world, not remembering it. ‘We appreciate, manage, enjoy, negotiate, confront, praise, love, argue, get through — all ways of understanding.’ But forgetting is necessary. It allows us to experience the world more fully and immediately. It helps us manage the painful events in our lives. And it encourages us to remember what’s important.
I know, a little much for Sunday morning tea…
Wear a poppy, don’t wear one. That is your right. Being honest, last year I did not sport one on my lapel. I have one in my living room and another in my car year-round. I am not an exceptional human being, that’s just my thing. I don’t wear Aids ribbons or ‘fight cancer’ wrist bands, nor do I type Amen to ridiculous posts about starving kids or three-legged misfits. I try not to take things for granted and be a decent human. It doesn’t always work out that way or that well. All we can do is try.
So as the seasonal music ramps up, baby its cold outside, and the nights get longer, let us try and remember what really matters, above the pointless shopping and excessive gratuities…cold drinks and a hot meal. A warm bed and a genuine smile. Friends and family. Its these things that they fought for. Its these things that they died for. They did this, so we would never have to.
They shall never grow old.
