Celebration or commemoration?

My father, Roland Garrett, in 1941

The period around the Second World War is one that interests me a lot and I've written a fair amount about it in both poetry and prose over the years. The war had only ended a short time before I was born and it was still having a massive residual effect on people's lives, both negatively and positively, throughout my childhood. So I'm perfectly happy that today, the 75th anniversary of VE Day, should be acknowledged and marked by present generations. But I see commemoration as a far more appropriate approach than celebration. .

Yes, our parents or our grandparents may have been celebrating that six years of hardship, separation, trauma and loss had come to an end, but more importantly they were looking forward to what they could now make of the world and their lives in it. Much of what we're seeing today, in the media and in the (socially-distanced!) street celebrations, seems backward looking, nostalgic, sentimental. We're dealing with our own crises at the moment and - with the evidence they've thrown up of so much inequality, mismanagement of services over a long period of time and so many other social injustices - we need to be looking forward, as our predecessors were in 1945, at what we can make of our world when they're all over. In no small part so that we can give the still-surviving veterans something much more tangible than the fleeting attention and praise they're getting today.