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I have a complicated relationship with Remembrance Day.

First, I don't believe the act of remembering and honouring our war dead should constitute a day off. Currently, banks and government offices close down. But I think everything should be functioning in high gear.

It is far more powerful and poignant to be going about your business, be it cashing a cheque or teaching a class, and then to pause - exactly at the appointed hour, along with thousands of others around the country - and bow your head to consider both the soldiers who have fought and died for our country and, in a broader sense, war itself.

More than one person has told me that given the whole day off they would probably go shopping. War doesn't take a day off. Neither should we.

Then there are the moral complexities.

I grew up in the first broadly anti-war generation, making the transition from an earnest schoolgirl in my Brownie uniform, nervously reciting In Flanders Fields (We are the dead. Short days ago/We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow ...) at the school assembly to an anti-Vietnam war university student who thought the lyrics from Country Joe and the Fish made a better point: "Well, come on mothers throughout the land,/Pack your boys off to Vietnam/Come on fathers, don't hesitate,/Send 'em off before it's too late./You can be the first one on your block/To have your boy come home in a box."

I then gave birth to another generation, kids who could easily spend their entire lives not knowing any soldier intimately. Not having a deep emotional stake in whether any one soldier lives or dies.

For them, there is no longer a widely held reverence for or even understanding of "the ultimate sacrifice," which is how giving one's life for one's country used to be viewed. Now, when word comes of another casualty in Afghanistan some very good people are apt to think, "What a waste."

War just doesn't make any sense to a whole lot of us these days for a great many reasons - we're fighting because of a political lie, we should not be imposing our democracy on a foreign country, war is not the way forward in this globally interconnected world, or, as a friend who lives in the United States says, "It doesn't make any sense that we may be Twittering with the people we bomb."

My friend has an enthralling new president who, referring more to economic than military imperatives, has somberly suggested that Americans will need to get in touch with the "spirit of sacrifice" in ways they haven't been seriously asked to (except for George Bush urging the citizenry to go shopping after 9/11) for a long while.

That will be interesting. The idea of any sacrifice is not one my generation grew up with and certainly not one we instilled in our children, many of whom have never been asked to give up anything in their privileged lives for the survival of society. Moreover, many of them have a casual disdain for war and all those who wage it.

Yet another element in this Remembrance Day stew is our growing outrage at what happens to civilians in these conflicts. War is more and more about civilian victims - women raped, children with legs blown off, families ravaged, not just by death and injury, but also economically and spiritually. They are the real casualties of war and yet we don't have a day to honour their memory.

But of course we do - today. This is the day we can think about our brave soldiers, about war, and about all its complexities and victims.

I usually lose one or two poppies in the lead-up to this day, suddenly grabbing my lapel when I am out in public and moaning, where did it go?

But I never miss the opportunity to stand solemnly and observe the moment at 11 o'clock. I like to watch the televised ceremony at Parliament Hill (okay, all those people participating actively in a service or ceremony can have the day off) and I always cry, especially when I see the last remaining veterans of the Second World War, their hands shaking from cold or old age or the memories of what they endured, placing their wreaths or saluting the cannons.

We need to keep honouring the sacrifice, but deploring the reasons for it. We also need to contemplate a wider world of sacrifice in these economically tumultuous times - that may have nothing to do with putting on a uniform and heading off to an armed conflict.

Which doesn't mean this day cannot be meaningful to just about everyone, no matter their age or proclivities: Remembrance Day is the day we can think anything we want about war, so long as we think about it at all.