I'm not offended by the white poppy, nor with the thought behind it.
We, the big "we," including the Government of Canada, the CF, the Legion and all of us who do know better have failed to make the real meaning - remembrance - of the poppy absolutely clear. A handful of
activists, many of who are anti-military, some of whom are militantly anti-war (isn't that a nice contradiction in terms?
) and a few of whom were, especially back in the 1930s to '60s, just following Moscow's
party line, have stolen the original white poppy campaign and they have persuaded another generation of youngsters to believe nonsense.
We have, I think, blurred the meaning of
Remembrance Day; the legion, for example, wants a
veterans' day ~ understandable, because it's a veterans' organization. The CF wants to honour everyone in uniform. The Government of Canada wants to show that it "cares," without actually doing anything that costs money.
That's
all it is about: not war, not veterans, not the military: just the dead and remembering "those," as Wilfred Owen put it "who die as cattle."
Soldiers, real soldiers, anyway, don't glorify war ~ they know it too well.