Veterans Day

I don't like holidays that aggrandize war, warmaking, or warriors, or which inflate the so-called noble things that people do ignoble things to other people for. I liked the honesty of the movie Patton, because right up front, right at the beginning of the movie, you see the General himself, standing in front of a giant American flag and telling his (unseen) troops that "nobody ever won a war by dying for his country -- you make the other XXXX die for HIS country." Right up front, the movie is honest about war.

Memorial Day is the day we remember those men and women who died while serving in the Armed Forces. So...if that's what Memorial Day is, then what is Veterans Day? Wikipedia says it's a "holiday honoring military veterans." I think that truly is the commonly understood meaning of the holiday.

Indeed, last Saturday morning, Joan and I were in a hotel in Milwaukee, attending a weekend conference. Starting early in the morning, in the street below our window, an early Veterans Day parade was assembling. And it was clear, from the floats to marchers to decorated cars and uniformed men and women, that the parade was assembled to honor our veterans.

HOWEVER... it's important to recall that Veterans Day commemorates the end of World War I, which ended with the signing of the Armistice on "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" in 1918. Hence, it was originally known as Armistice Day, the day that ended the "war to end all war."

David Swanson posted a short but excellent article on Veterans Day a few days ago, entitled Farhenheit 11/11/11, in which he reminds us that: "November 11th was not made a holiday in order to celebrate war, support troops, or cheer the 11th year of occupying Afghanistan. This day was made a holiday in order to celebrate an armistice that ended what was up until that point, in 1918, one of the worst things our species had thus far done to itself, namely World War I."

He quotes Sherwood Eddy, an early and enthusiastic supporter of U.S. entry into World War I, who had abhorred pacifism, but who later came to write The Abolition of War (1924), and support the international campaign to outlaw all war. At the war front, as the battles raged, Eddy writes, 'We told the soldiers that if they would win we would give them a new world.'

Swanson goes on: "As President Wilson had talked up peace as the official reason for going to war, countless souls had taken him extremely seriously." Thus, "The decade following the war was a decade of searching for peace. Peace echoed through so many sermons, speeches, and state papers that it drove itself into the consciousness of everyone. Never in world history was peace so great a desideratum, so much talked about, looked toward, and planned for, as in the decade after the 1918 Armistice."

I wasn't alive then, but I find that picture very believable, and it gives me a lot of hope. However not long after that, the Great Depression descended upon the country, and we worried about other things.

Still, it's good to remember that this holiday is about the END of war and warrior-ing. Let's celebrate THAT cause.