Poppies

94 years ago today, the Great War came to an end. Life in Canada went back to normal, or as normal as things can get when a small nation loses over sixty thousand dead and suffers even more wounded. The country attempted to return to a sense of normal in the years and decades that followed, until an even greater war broke out in 1939, followed by a brutal war on the Korean pennisula, smaller conflicts that fell under the guise of "peacekeeping" even when there was no peace to keep, and our own contemporary war in Afghanistan.

Ever since the firing ceased in 1918, the poppy has served as a symbol for remembering the sacrifices of the combatant. Whether it was inspired by the great Canadian First World War poem In Flanders' Fields, or whether it was the result of a natural association between the poppy and opiates which bring the sleep that serves as a metaphor for death, the days leading up to Remembrance Day are awash in a sea of poppies.

In a way, it is fitting that the poppy serves this role. It is a link between the First World War, where poppies grew between the crosses in Flanders' fields, and Afghanistan, where drug lords harvest them to make drugs to sell to the rest of the world.