For better, or for worse, she will never be forgotten. Still Britain’s only female prime minister, and the most successful prime minster of the twentieth century.
What did I do for Valentine’s Day this year you ask? Why, I went to the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire to listen to a talk about death.
To be fair, I then went home for a romantic meal and some quality time with Elina, but the talk itself was well worth attending too – the speaker Matthew Simpson, is a Celebrant and talked us through his take on death and how the Humanist approach differs from that of the religions.
Following on from yesterday’s post about Remembrance Day and my recent thoughts about venerating the military, I thought I would expand a bit on the subject based on some of the conversations I’ve had.
As I said in my previous post, it is interesting that we give so much respect to those who gave their live in war, but so little respect to those who gave their life to keep our supermarkets stocked with fish, or our power plants stocked with coal – even though fishing and mining are high fatality industries. You’re right, I wouldn’t want to go to war and I’m glad someone else is willing to do it, but I would equally hate working down a mine!
The standard response to such a question is that people choose to work as fishermen and miners, but then people choose to sign up to the military as well. We don’t operate any kind of conscription in the UK, beyond that of economic conscription that I discussed in my previous post, so every solider in the army today signed up voluntarily, and is handsomely rewarded for it. Interestingly, I’ve never heard anyone say “no, don’t bother paying me, I’m joining because it’s the right thing to do, not for the money.”
It becomes a different matter when we were talking about actual conscription during the world wars, when people were forced to go to war. But the sad reality of it is, if you were conscripted into the army, that wasn’t really a noble sacrifice was it, because you didn’t have a choice. It’s a pretty horrible truth, but a truth none the less.
Actually, the truth is much more horrible when you think about conscription. It wasn’t that these people chose to die for their country, it’s that we, as a society, murdered them. We executed them; sent them to their death. They didn’t decide to go and die, we made them go and die. If anything, Remembrance Day should share a similar tone to Holocaust Memorial Day.
What I found most interesting about the attitudes of people surrounding Remembrance Day, was how closely it fits in with what I said in my previous post about venerating the military. The upper classes sending the lower classes to die in their wars.
This was most apparently in specifically two of my friends, Kieran who retweeted extensively on the subject and Rebecca whose idea it was to go out to the war memorial on November 11th. Now, neither of these are people are either royalty nor right wing nutters. I consider them both good friends, but they are both from well off backgrounds and if I was to pick the two of my friends most likely to vote Conservative, I would pick those two (except for Norm, who I suspect mostly votes Conservative because even though he wants to vote Labour now, could never admit he was wrong about a political party 😉 ).
Indeed, when I had a discussion with Rebecca about it, and pointed out that if you sentence someone to death using conscription (it’s a to lot easier because you don’t have to bother with that whole trial by their peers nonsense), then it’s not really a noble sacrifice because they didn’t choose it, she seemed to get very flustered and told me to “just stop it now.”
That upset me somewhat because I felt like she was trying to claim the moral high ground, even though she was speaking on the pro-war side and I was suggesting it isn’t cool to sent working class people to their death just so our dirty work can get done. But this isn’t about my sensitive emotional centre carefully wrapped in an excessive amount of hair.
The response struck me as that of a religious believer when you’ve just found a massive problem with their worldview. They don’t know what to do. “You can’t say that – that’s not on the script! Don’t you understand how this works. We have to maintain the veneer or all the poor people will realise that our wars aren’t worth them dying for.”
Though as I discussed in my previous post, just because I feel that is the truth, doesn’t provide an answer as to what to do about it. Maybe we do need to keep even our own minds ignorant of the beast below.
I’ve suddenly found myself becoming a prolific anti-war blogger and I didn’t really mean for this to happen. But, I have a severe tendency to play Devil’s Advocate and with it being Remembrance Day as I write this, I suddenly seem to have become left wing.
So, I was just wondering. Remembrance Day. My question is, what exactly are we remembering?
I think the answer is, we’re remembering those who gave their lives in war, but I think a more accurate way to put my question might be, what is the purpose of remembering?
It isn’t to honour the dead, really. No remembrance ever is. Because they’re dead, so it doesn’t benefit them. Funerals are a great example of this, we don’t hold a funeral for those who have sadly passed away, we hold it for the people left behind to help them move on with their lives. A funeral is to give ourselves closure and help us to deal with the loss.
So perhaps the answer is to give ourselves some closure about the whole incident.
However, I’m not sure that is the case because we do it every year. I think, actually, Remembrance Day has a far more important purpose. We remember to remind ourselves that this should never happen again. Although clearly, we didn’t remember hard enough the first time, so more accurately, this should never happen a third time.
That I think is a worthwhile and noble purpose, one which the tradition of Remembrance Day is well worth dedicated time and effort to. It makes the world a better place.
Unfortunately, when I look at this, I wonder how much good it actually does. We don’t even have pictures of some of them.
Yesterday the technology industry was saddened by the passing of Apple founder and chairman, Steve Jobs.
Steve was a visionary who literally changed the world for the better by bringing new and innovative technology to the public in a way which was always intuitive and more importantly, magical. Every time I pick up my iPad, I still feel like I’m living in Star Trek.
Tributes have poured in from politicians, to business leaders, to the many, any Apple fans across the world. In a touching note Bill Gates described working with him as “an insanely great honor.”
He’ll be missed by all of us in the field of technology.
OMG.
I mean, you think you’re doing alright, you’re cruising through life, got my car sorted, getting my house sorted, got through the first week of my new job. And then something like this happens.
I think we can all agree that there is a a hole in all of our lives. Whatever you thought of Jackson (who was found innocent of course) his music was universally loved, he was rightfully refered to as “the king of pop” and his album Thriller remains arguably the biggest selling album of all time.
If anyone else is planning to fly out for the funeral, let me know and we can organise something.
