Wearing your Poppy with Pride?

I first started noticing the red blooms on people's coats and jackets about two weeks ago. It struck me once again, the small idiosyncracies that mark out life in Belfast from life here. In N.I., wearing a poppy is so fraught with symbolic associations (with Empire, Imperialism, the disputed and debated role of Ulster soliders during WW1 and WW2, the Easter uprising in 1916 deliberately taking advatnage of WW1 etc etc), that as an English person, I don't wear one. Plus they are very hard to find! Last night, I ended up discussing poppies with my flatmates, L (a friend who has also lived in Belfast) and C. C said she never wore them, as she found them militaristic and jingoistic, and her sympathy for present day soldiers was v limited, although she did think WW1 was different, and the men who fought there had little if any choice. I thought about how, all through my childhood, I had unquestioningly bought a poppy every year at school, never really thinking about its wider connotations. I thought about how just because I am back in London, all the unfortunate meanings of the poppy that inhibit me wearing it in Belfast don't just go away. Yet when I walked into the BL and saw some for sale, I popped a pound in the box and bought one. I don't know if I will wear it on my coat. I hate the hypocritical political rhetoric that claims our 'freedom' is dependent on highly powerful weapons, a standing army, and a nuclear "deterrent". I hate the fact that we are prosecuting an illegal war in Iraq and threatening to do the same to Iran because these countries dare to (want to) have those things too. Does my poppy symbolise support for this? On the other hand, I am profoundly grateful that I live in a country with freedom of speech, where I have been highly educated, where I have the right to vote, where we have a (reasonably) tolerant attitude towards diversity, where we have freedom of conscience. People have sacrificied their lives for me to have this. So I buy my poppy, and let it sit at the bottom of my bag, a symbol of my own conflicted attitudes towards these issues.