In fact, I've never worn a poppy. I've occasionally put money in the Royal British Legion collection boxes, but I've not, in my adult life at least, actually pinned one on and walked round with it. I've just never felt comfortable doing so, despite my conventional background and the general sense of it being 'the done thing'. Why?
Two reasons I guess, each related to the two main reasons people would cite for wearing poppies. The main one of course is remembrance - it's right to recall and acknowledge the lives given by service personnel over the last century and a bit, and in the various conflicts. I understand that, and am sympathetic to it, and if the wearing of the poppy were a purely grassroots-inspired movement, I might feel differently. But it's not - politicians, royalty, newsreaders and the like all ostentatiously wear their poppies; it's become an establishment thing, clearly. The very same establishment that has been pretty cavalier over the years with the lives of the people they now want us to remember.
I don't care that WW2 and, more controversially perhaps, the Falklands were wars that needed to be fought to either defend ourselves from or deter aggressors; there are many other examples, WW1 obviously being the largest and most egregious, where the establishment, viz. the government and the military command, demonstrably didn't give a sh*t about the lives of the people it was sending into battle. The tactics, the slaughter, the gratuitousness were indefensible. Iraq and Afghanistan weren't much better. So it feels a bit rich for the political class and the military class to now exhort us to remember each year. Wearing a poppy feels like, to me, endorsing their crass, callous decisions over the years. The lads (and lately lasses) were expendable, but let's take a couple of minutes a year to pretend their loss had some meaning, shall we?
I could even partly forgive their hypocrisy were it not for the second purpose of the poppy: fundraising. It's always seemed astonishing to me that ex-service people should have to rely on charity - yes, CHARITY - for support both during and after their time in the military. If you volunteer to serve your country, then any lifelong needs you have from any harm that's incurred during that service should, at the very least, be paid for by the state. The fact that they're not underlines to me my earlier point - the establishment doesn't really care about the sailors, soldiers and airmen & women; it just pretends to. Fur coat and no knickers is the basis of their attitude to service personnel - we'll weep over your coffin in full public view, but we won't fund the things you need to have a decent life once your service ends. Again, wearing a poppy feels like I'm endorsing that attitude, the status quo, and I won't do it.
I've felt like this for years without being able to articulate it, but the last 18 months have brought home to me just how little politicians and governments really care about their populaces, both now (especially now), but actually for as long as there's been representative administrations. I'm not saying there aren't some decent people in the political classes, but the prevailing approach is one of doing and saying anything to reach and keep power, whether that be cynically expending the lives of the predominantly working class that staff the armed forces, and/or then equally cynically being seen to mourn their loss. Frankly, it makes me sick.
So not wearing a poppy doesn't mean, in my mind, that I don't care about those who've perished; it means quite the opposite - I don't want to perpetuate how things are done now. The war dead, and the ones who survived, deserved so much better for the most part.
