I am watching CBC’s coverage of the US mid-term elections because they’re slightly less annoying than CNN/C-SPAN/Fox/ABC/etc. All the Canadian News people are wearing poppy pins, which led me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole on how the poppy flower is a symbol for remembering military service members. It dates back to a WWI era poem, and also inspired France to do create a similar bleuet de France.
It also led me to this 2015 article in which some Canadians considered it “defacing” the symbol to use a safer pin design than an inches long stick pin. I’m just glad USians aren’t the only that get mouth-frothing stupid about arbitrary symbols. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/remembrance-day-poppy-pin-that-won-t-fall-off-1.3311799
Yeah, to you it’s an arbitrary symbol but to others, from the very point of inception, it was a visible reminder of the once very human friend, partner, parent, sibling etc that had been killed in conflict and would no longer be part of your life ever again.
Grave stones are just lumps of rock, but people get upset when I take a piss on one - go figure. Emotional humans are weird.
And your thoughts on whether one must use the original stick pin or is it ok and not actually “defacing” the symbol to use a safer pin design? That’s the “arbitrary” bit I was making fun of.
I don’t even wear one… Generally these things do have some protocol though - but I’m not Canadian and in the other Commonwealth countries I’ve spent Remembrance Day in I’ve never encountered this debate.
Americans aren’t big on WWI. It’s not the “loss of a generation” slaughter it is to the rest of the parties involved