- Joined
- Apr 24, 2010
- Messages
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- Upper Canada 🇨🇦
- 🥇 Banner finds
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- Detector(s) used
- XP Deus, Lesche Piranha 35 Shovel & 'Garrett Carrot'
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Thread Owner
What made her extraordinary was not who she was, but what she gave.
She became the Queen before many of us were born, before many of our mothers were born. Whether you loved her or not she was always there. Death and taxes and Queen Elizabeth II were the only certainties of life for 70 years, until she died on Thursday at the age of 96. Chances were that what you loved or hated wasn’t the woman herself but the institution she embodied, a sprawling $28 billion firm of inherited titles and property. The woman herself, she was a cipher by design. Her position prevented her from vocalizing opinions on politics, elections, social movements and individual people or anything of consequence really, because modern monarchs don’t run the government even while they appear on its money.
She was an avid outdoor person, she loved Corgis, horses and hunting expeditions. You may have read somewhere that as a teenager she served as a mechanic in World War II. She saved her wartime rations to pay for her wedding dress and thereby won the love of a nation that, in those dark days, needed a fairy tale but a practical one. Was it a fairy tale or was it feminism? The highest-ranking woman in the world, and her power came not by her hard work or by a wedding ring on her finger but by a chaotic ladder of genealogy reaching through centuries: beheadings and infertility, abdications and overthrowings. All of which leading up to this singular woman holding the throne longer than anyone had before, or likely ever will again.
This to me, her legacy is the remarkable thing. That for 70-years the most important figure in Britain was a woman who did not do many of the things or embody many of the characteristics that society often demands women do and be. For 70 years, the Commonwealth’s most important resident was an extremely average woman who was made sublime only because the people allowed her to be. She did her work. Whatever any of us think of the monarchy, we can think something of showing up to do the work. “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service,” she once told her future subjects in a radio address broadcast on her 21st birthday. “And the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”
She insisted, that she was merely a humble public servant. And the most extraordinary thing, is that’s what she was all along.
She became the Queen before many of us were born, before many of our mothers were born. Whether you loved her or not she was always there. Death and taxes and Queen Elizabeth II were the only certainties of life for 70 years, until she died on Thursday at the age of 96. Chances were that what you loved or hated wasn’t the woman herself but the institution she embodied, a sprawling $28 billion firm of inherited titles and property. The woman herself, she was a cipher by design. Her position prevented her from vocalizing opinions on politics, elections, social movements and individual people or anything of consequence really, because modern monarchs don’t run the government even while they appear on its money.
She was an avid outdoor person, she loved Corgis, horses and hunting expeditions. You may have read somewhere that as a teenager she served as a mechanic in World War II. She saved her wartime rations to pay for her wedding dress and thereby won the love of a nation that, in those dark days, needed a fairy tale but a practical one. Was it a fairy tale or was it feminism? The highest-ranking woman in the world, and her power came not by her hard work or by a wedding ring on her finger but by a chaotic ladder of genealogy reaching through centuries: beheadings and infertility, abdications and overthrowings. All of which leading up to this singular woman holding the throne longer than anyone had before, or likely ever will again.
This to me, her legacy is the remarkable thing. That for 70-years the most important figure in Britain was a woman who did not do many of the things or embody many of the characteristics that society often demands women do and be. For 70 years, the Commonwealth’s most important resident was an extremely average woman who was made sublime only because the people allowed her to be. She did her work. Whatever any of us think of the monarchy, we can think something of showing up to do the work. “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service,” she once told her future subjects in a radio address broadcast on her 21st birthday. “And the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”
She insisted, that she was merely a humble public servant. And the most extraordinary thing, is that’s what she was all along.
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