Helen K🎗️🇮🇱🇨🇦🇺🇸

The red poppy is not a blank canvas for every cause or identity group. It is a specific, long-standing symbol of remembrance for those who served and died in Canada’s wars and for the support of veterans and their families. The Royal Canadian Legion has consistently defended that meaning and disagreed with claims that it “focuses too much on soldiers” or “glorifies war.” White, purple, black, and informal rainbow versions exist as alternatives pushed by other groups with their own agendas. The main reason these groups promote the multicoloured versions is so they can sell them and make money off people who buy them. That does not make them equivalent to the red one, and it does not require teaching children that the traditional poppy is somehow problematic or in need of replacement. Those who served did not need matching identity categories to stand together. Turning Remembrance Day materials into a menu of coloured poppies for different grievances fragments a shared act of national remembrance. War is terrible. That does not erase the fact that the conflicts commemorated by the red poppy were, at the time, necessary for Canada’s survival and the existence of the free country we have today. Honouring that sacrifice is not the same as celebrating war. We should refuse to buy any poppy outside of the red one during Remembrance Day, when we are supposed to stop and remember why we have this country. The red poppy should be left alone as the central, unifying symbol. Everything does not need to be remade into an identity debate.

Last week I was in Israel, surrounded by joyous Jewish life. Today I stood at Auschwitz, where my Jewish friends prayed in the gas chambers for relatives murdered there. I finally understand how the Holocaust became possible. And I am frightened by what I see around us. “Never Again” is NOW. mrandrewfox.substack.com/p/l…