The thought that article provokes in this veteran is "Build a bridge, buddy, and get over yourself."

Remembrance Day has always been political, whether we like it or not, because it is a sop thrown to the public by governments that spend not only our money but also our lives in pursuit of policies that may or may not do us any good. The proof of that pudding is in the eating, and in many cases we don't get a taste until long after the bills are paid.

As we get older and edge into the third (or fourth, or even fifth) acts of our lives, we have to come to terms with the fact that those younger than us, who are in the thick of the Big Drama of their lives, make up the bulk of the population, and they don't think like us and their consequent actions sometimes strike us as awkward or inappropriate.

I am sixty-one years old and a veteran of the Cold War. My husband is fifty-eight and still serving, with a rack of medals from NATO and UN deployments. Both of us are the children of Second World War veterans, brought up in post-war British garrison culture. We both find today's version of Remembrance Day kinda strange; for example, it jolts me to hear applause from the crowd as the veterans' contingent marches by the National War Memorial, and the practice of depositing poppies on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier strikes me as both sentimental and untidy.

But the applause seems natural to people in the crowd because they see themselves as members of an audience, whereas I think of them as participants in the ceremony, like the congregation in church. The poppies on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier are put there by people who think it a gracious gesture, like the bouquets I saw thrust between the bars of the fence around the U.S. Embassy on 12 September 2001, or the teddy bears deposited at the site of an incident in which a child has died. It's not something I would do because it strikes me as undignified.

But it's not about me. Back in the 70s, when you could fire a shotgun across Confederation Square on Remembrance Day and not harm a soul, that wasn't about me, either, although I was freezing my feet on the concrete, or about my Dad, on parade among the naval veterans. Now, when a total stranger wants to buy my husband a coffee in Tim's (much to his embarrassment), that's not about him; he's just the soldier who is physically present when some random nice guy feels the prick of obligation and chooses that way of acting on it. He graciously accepts because to do otherwise would make the random nice guy feel bad.

We happen to be in a time of "better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all" -- a period when civilians are feeling a prick of shame at what some military personnel have endured and how rough their lives can become as a result. It would be nice if that shame could be translated into effective support services for those disabled by PTSD, but I'm not holding my breath.