remembering what?

I don't like rememberance day, I never have. I'm not interested in taking up the quarrel of dead soldiers with their foe. As long as I can remember I have thought that war is pointless. Even before I could put my thoughts about it into words I could hear that the people I knew who joined the military in the UK had different accents to those who were officers.
So, what do I remember on the 11.11? That my children have great-grandfathers who fought on both sides of WW2? That the German baby who became my father-in-law was left fatherless by the stupidity of the Russian Front? Years of nightmares, men not speaking of what they've seen but withdrawing themselves from their family so that their sons don't know how to be fathers? The fear of mothers watching TV news during the Falklands war, knowing that somewhere in all that fighting, their baby is going through hell and for what? People who I was in school with being sent to Northern Ireland age 16?
Mutilation, suicide, fear....that's what I remember.
And I see people writing offensive and racist comments and texts. I hear people being lambasted for pointing out that which I worked out when I was a little girl - that it's poor people dying in these wars while rich people just carry on their lives.
And I see all these little poppy seeds, which could be seeds of hope for a better future but are more likely to grow into little drops of blood on a battlefield far away.

War disgusts me, it always will. There are other ways to freedom and peace than war. But the opinions and attitudes and structures that support war are hard to dismantle because it goes right to the roots of the stuff that our society is based on.
After growing up in a family that seemed to think that uniforms and military and all that guff are, well, I'm not even sure I know the word for it - I'm glad that I married into a family of conscientious objectors who would rather go to prison than take part in the stupidity that is military service. And I'm glad that my children are intelligent enough to not go off and fight for another man's cause.