#remebrance day

[cns-mari]

If you can't stay silent for 2 minutes (unless youre coughing, hiccuping, have tics or any other valid reason to make noise) to respect those who have died in international conflicts respectfully DNI and go fuck yourself

[ctyguidelondon]

You'll have to get up early on a Sunday morning because they open Whitehall to the public at 8 AM, but it's definitely worth attending the next Remembrance Day Parade in November. It's one of those events that chokes you up. The only other event in London that affected me like that was when they blew the Last Post at the Ceremony of the Keys in the Tower of London.

[bantarleton]

Inverness’s Garden of Remebrance.

[all-caps-ghost]

IT'S REMEMBRANCE DAY IN THE UK

I DON'T TAKE A DAY OF REST

PLENTY OF TIME TO REST SOMEDAY

BUT NOT TODAY

NEVER FORGET

[arcturus11]

In Remebrance Of - Lest we forget their sacrifice to keep us free.

[adeleden]

(via 11 November we will remember them designs Long T-Shirt by Denislov)

[canajunfinances]

Remembrance Day – we shall remember those who serve and those who served  (via Remembrance Day)

[thedancingwalrus-blog]

Last year I posted quotes from Owen and Sassoon.

This year I’ve been thinking a lot about remembrance and what we choose to remember. The parts of history we choose to make our stories and the parts we over look.

This year I’m remembering that the average income here has effectively fallen for a decade while the cost of living has risen. That our soldiers are still mostly drawn from the poorest sections of society, the men and women who feel as if they have no other options. 

That while we lionise the literate oxbridge educated elites from the first World War the majority of soldiers, the majority of the dead on both sides, would have been working class people.

That papers at the time described a bayonet as ‘a weapon with a worker on each end’.

This year I’m remembering that the men who manned Hadrian’s Wall were black and arabic. And it was a working class woman from the North who began the call for suffrage in this country. And that Alfred the Great was disabled when he fought off the Vikings. That Sassoon was queer.

We are so very much what we choose to remember. It directs us and effects what we are capable of becoming.

I suppose I am starting to see it as a collective responsibility. Not a passive thing but an active choice. We can only build from the best of our history when we know it is there.