Help]: The commemoration of D-Day is little more than a shedding of crocodile tears that is pointless and boring, says one 29-year-old woman
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Your support makes all the difference.Is there anyone out there like me who is thoroughly fed up with D-Day?
I know our vets and those who died were incredibly brave, and that it was one of the greatest tactical triumphs ever, but there must be other young people - I'm 29 - to whom the anniversary seems like an excuse for the big boys to play with their toys. Don't you just want to smash up all those silly little models of ships and tanks and squash the plasticine beaches, and tear up the tedious maps? Nice work boys, but now we're bored by it.
In fact some of us are retreating into a deep bunker, sorry, period of hibernation, for the next three days as the supplements and TV programmes, each with their own heart rending war stories, reach saturation point.
Is there anyone out there who has the nerve to admit that they cannot salute such awesome rhetoric?
Because rhetoric it surely is. What have governments the world over ever really done for returning soldiers? What does a measly war pension add up to when you've lost your loved one? Not much. In the US there are thousands of men suffering from 'Gulf sickness'. Do the authorities care? No, the authorities are pretending it doesn't exist.
There is something completely meaningless about trying to recreate an experience and spirit that no longer exist. Yes, 50 years ago those were the days, a time when the nation was one, when you shared your sandwiches and sang songs down the Underground, and everyone dug for victory. In 1994 that spirit no longer exists. These days you would be lucky to get the drippings off someone's nose and no one has got any gum, chum.
And if that doesn't get on your nerves then this will: the lie. The big lie that is continually thrust down our throats, that someone died in order that we might live. Because all wars judder to their terrible conclusion, they stop, then they crank themselves up again, and inevitably more die. Lives are given up as they are being given up in Bosnia every day, but once they are given up they are forgotten. I don't think these D-Day events are about the people who really suffered; they are about celebrating a military victory.
Perhaps Falstaff, in Henry IV, Part 1, said it best:
'Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? Can honour set-to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is in that word, honour? air. A trim reckoning]'
Youth should unite against this quasi-remembrance of war, this pitiful celebration. It's no celebration, this shedding of crocodile tears. And, so, like Falstaff, here ends my catechism.
(Photograph omitted)
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