recceguy said:
Can we stop. The ranting and raving sounds just like the people being bitched about.
I don't go to the service to listen to any of it. I zone out and remember my friends and family that answered the call and paid for it. I remember comrades, from 37 years of service, that have passed.
Remembrance Day is not about ceremony or laying a wreath for your organization instead of getting the lazy members to attend the gathering. It's about you and your thoughts and is not a day but 7/24s. Let the posers have their day puffing their chests and yelling commands creating the unique confuaion of colour parties that all have their own version of Branch drill.
Well, that's my :2c:
Don't forget to stop arguing for a couple of minutes on the day.
I know I'm repeating myself, and I apologize in advance, it's an annual thing for me, but ...
The Legion's "ownership" of remembrance day is recent* and doesn't apply to me ... and, yes, thank you, I have a f'ing dog in this fight, which is more than I can say for most people in the RCL.
There is a danger in what the Legion does: the legion is an advocacy group, it advocates
for veterans. But:
Remembrance Day is NOT about veterans ... it started as a chance to allow veterans to join with families and the sovereign to honour the war dead: and, in Canada, war widows were not part of the "Legion family" because their husbands were not veterans ~ not having made it back in order to be discharged.
The service is simple and consist ONLY of:
A very brief formal "welcome" which probably includes the national anthem, and may include a reading of "In Flanders Fields."
The Act of Remembrance ~ a few lines from a poem (For the Fallen) by Laurence Binyon;
Two minutes of silence, which may punctuated by two "calls:" the last post and the rouse, and/or by a piper playing a lament; and
A solemn dismissal, which may include a reading of
Ecclesiasticus 44:7: "
All these were honoured in their generations, and were the glory of their times," if it is not offensive to too many people.
I understand the Legion has "rules:" they are silly, artficial things, made to advance the Legion's advocacy work ... they do not apply to anyone who wants to
remember on Remembrance Day.
Everything else, even the wreath laying by the Sovereign and the Silver Cross Mother, is window dressing ... it is right and fitting that both should lay wreathes, and it is right and proper that others, in no particular order ~ everyone else in equal in relation to the dead, ought to do so, too, but it is a detail, not part of the core. Prayers are optional, ditto parades and, especially, marching veterans.
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* Remembrance Day was started by King George V in 1919, the RCL was founded in 1925
