on turning the corner

hey! you've found the place where pablo's blog is posted: here you'll find an alternative window on the world, enhanced with poetic reflections and some passport trails to track pablo's globehopping ventures — enjoy!

November 13, 2006

Looking beyond…

Why the white poppy? Only when asked this question on Sunday did I become aware of a pretty intense debate going on in some UK media. I have since read much that has been written, including plenty of sanctimonious nonsense on both sides with writers seeming to delight in giving and taking offence. With such disagreement over ill–articulated significance invested in symbols, it is no surprise humans cannot solve the problem of war. So, here are a few reflections on the colour of a flower.

It seems to me that the red poppy and the white poppy are two perspectives on the same actuality, two faces of the one coin, two weights in the balance. white poppy A red poppy is the colour of blood, a white poppy is the colour of peace. Red mourns lives lost in battle, white laments that we have wars at all. Red looks back to the horrors of war, white looks forward to the time when there will be no more war. Red remembers the past with regret, white envisions the future in hope. Red sees humanity as we are, white offers humanity what we could be.

In wearing a poppy, of either colour, we are recognising painfully that things are not as they should be. But whichever colour we wear, recognition alone is inadequate. We need to work for world where peace is not simply pacification, nor the mere absence of obvious militarised violence in the streets. We need to struggle towards a future where every system and structure of domination, subjugation, oppression, corruption, injustice, exploitation, abuse and neglect is demolished and dismantled never to be rebuilt.

Yet we need also the creativity to pursue our yearning struggle in radically different ways. For if such a peace is ever to become a reality, it will never come about through violence.

1 Comments:

Blogger Harper said...

...White poppies...? Not at all on this side of the world - not even somethign I'd heard of, until I sumbled here.

Though I confess to being a traiditonalist. Following the imagry of Flander's Fields and all that, red just seems ... more significant to me.

White seems to me to be overly optimistic, to gloss over what the vets did for us then, to almost ignore the reality of war...

11:37 pm  

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