Poppy fury misses point of Remembrance
dId you go to the gym this weekend? notice anything? no poppies. Why would there be? You’re on a treadmill, you’re on a cross trainer, you’re lifting weights. You wouldn’t affix a poppy for that. The same with Sunday league football, amateur rugby matches, hockey fixtures. Local clubs do not embroider a poppy symbol into their uniforms. never have, never will. It would be prohibitively expensive. That doesn’t mean they don’t care. I’ve seen grassroots games where a minute of silence was impeccably observed, others where the teams played right through the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. nobody was outraged. It fell midway through the first half.
When you finish in the gym, you shower, change and then you may, or may not, wear a poppy. That is your choice. But no person introduces a poppy into every aspect of his or her life. You wouldn’t sleep in it, you wouldn’t swim in it, wouldn’t go jogging in it, wouldn’t take it to a Pilates class. It does not mean you do not care, or are being disrespectful.
Remembrance isn’t a 24-hour activity. There is a time, and a place, and we all understand that. Until it comes to football. When it comes to football, everybody loses their minds. Playing football, like visiting the gym, is an athletic activity. A player might wear a poppy to the match, or after the match — but during? Why, when we do not observe such standards in our own lives? It is completely new, the demand that footballers wear poppy symbols in november — or before, now clubs are so terrified or causing offence they move the ceremony to October, if they haven’t got a fixture around the appropriate date.
The irony being that footballers from the eras of the great wars, men who quite probably would have lost team-mates, family members and certainly friends, would be utterly mystified by this annual outcry.
Before 1945, Britain simply observed Remembrance day, and with utter sincerity too. Electricity supplies were cut to halt trams, the engines of the Royal navy’s ships were turned off, court proceedings and the business of the stock exchange was suspended for two minutes. The nation, as one, stood in silence.
Remembrance Sunday’s arrival diluted the power of that act, and now Remembrance has become a season, like Halloween or Christmas, taking place over several weeks, hijacked by empty gestures, shows of emotion, and grandstanding politicians such as damian Collins and our opportunist Prime Minister.
And in all this hype and froth an essential truth is lost. They were great men, who died for our freedom. And they were fighting for a damn sight more than this.