Hello everyone,
I hope this note finds you
all well.
This post is on a rather
different topic than usual. On Apr 2, 2016, I wrote to our Mayor and Councillors.
A report to Community and Protective
Services Committee on Wednesday, March 3 - LAVIII Public Art Monument - recommends
funding up to $100,000 to be "drawn from the City of London Public Art
Acquisition Reserve Fund" for purchase of a LAV war vehicle, to become a
war memorial at Wolseley Barracks.
In my own opinion, an object phrased as
having "unsurpassed lethality" and described as "formidable and
dominates the battlefield" is not an art piece. Those phrases come directly from the General
Dynamics website, advertising the merits of their products.
I urge all members of City
Council to vote against spending City funds to purchase a weapon to be used as
a war memorial.
Ursula Franklin once wrote
that "violence is resourcelessness".
She has written and spoken about "the futility of war and the
connection between peace and social justice",
and has been an active member of the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace.
I'm sure she would challenge London Council
to come up with a more resourceful way to remember soldiers killed in war ...
and perhaps to come up with a memorial that indicates that the lives sacrificed
by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were related to lives lost and livelihoods
destroyed of the people in that country.
War is not a series of isolated
soldiers. Canadian lives lost in a war elsewhere do not give us
permission to forget the people of that other country.
A thoughtful expression of it being wrong
to spend any money on such a vehicle for a monument is in Larry Cornies
article, printed in Saturday's London National Post (er Free Press) ... but, notably, not on the
website. I urge you to read it and
consider.
Another London
Free Press article reported that all members of CPSC voted for this.
I hope that all Councillors next week will
vote against City funds to purchase a lethal weapon for a monument, and will
request that any monument meet Franklin's
challenge.
One councillor
wrote back to let me know he had recused his vote at Committee because he is in
the Canadian Armed Forces. I wrote him back, of course.
My late father was in the British army for 14 years,
about 1937 to 1951, serving in Egypt, Malta,
and what was for his time Palestine.
My Dad almost never spoke about his time in the army, but I remember turning
around one time when a war movie was on tv and he had tears in his eyes.
He said sometimes, when a news item came on, that people never thought what war
did to the people living in the country where the fighting happened. My
mother's first fiance was a
Canadian pilot, killed within the first year of WWII. Dad never bothered
her to get rid of his photo, which she kept in the bottom drawer of the dining
room buffet; I still have that photo.
So, in my experience, remembering soldiers and people of the war zone is connected. I hadn't even recalled these things until the recent news items ... and have seldom had a reaction to anything as viscerally as the thought of another memorial tank. (And I hate those guns pointed out from Provost by the river forks.)
So, in my experience, remembering soldiers and people of the war zone is connected. I hadn't even recalled these things until the recent news items ... and have seldom had a reaction to anything as viscerally as the thought of another memorial tank. (And I hate those guns pointed out from Provost by the river forks.)
Thanks for the ear everyone,
Best regards,
Why's Woman
Ursula Franklin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin
LAVIII Public Art Monument: http://sire.london.ca/cache/2/fafg20u2unnnfq45d45gl245/22179204022016083453720.PDF
Critics of LAV memorial stir political discomfort
before Tuesday decision
http://www.lfpress.com/2016/04/01/critics-of-lav-memorial-stir-political-discomfort-before-tuesday-decision
http://www.lfpress.com/2016/04/01/critics-of-lav-memorial-stir-political-discomfort-before-tuesday-decision
