Also known as the post most likely to be misunderstood.
Today is Veteran’s Day (formerly Armistice Day). The day when the bank is closed, you can’t fix your traffic ticket and no mail arrives. What I think we all consider a major inconvenience. Because, after all, our National Holidays can’t have any other deeper meaning.
But, to me at least, a day set aside for the Veterans has no meaning. It’s an arbitrary day that no one notices and no one acknowledges. Even if we did, however, we’d still just use it as an excuse to sear animal flesh and consume libations.
Worse still, Veteran’s Day has replaced a day that had significance. Armistice Day. The day marking the end of WWI. That had meaning, but instead we grafted on an artifice honoring all veterans. Could you imagine if we turned Pearl Harbor Day into a day to commemorate all people who lost their lives as the result of a surprise attack? What meaning does that have?
None. It does nothing to remember the actual acts and sacrifices of veterans. So I suggest that we find a new day to commemorate all Veterans’ contributions to our lives. A day where any man and woman who served in a war gets the day off. People come over and clean their house, balance their checkbook, make dinner for them. Do whatever they need to have done. Better yet, ask them about their war experience. Because after being shot at, or worse, I think you deserve one day a year, for the rest of your life, to sit in peace and quiet and not have to worry about anything.
But that’s just me. I’ll keep Armistice Day. Not because I don’t believe Veteran’s Day is worthy. It just shouldn’t be today. Today we should stop and remember a moment when human beings managed to stop killing each other.
Below is the text of an email I’ve been sending out every year since I’ve had access to email. It reminds us what today is really about. Consequently, it was written by Kurt Vonnegut. Oddly enough, today is also his birthday. He is a veteran as well. And a former German prisoner of war from WWII.
“So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
“It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one and another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
“Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' day is not.
“So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
“What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
“And all music is.”
To that I will add the following piece of Vonnegut’s. This comes from his classic novel Slaughter-House Five. At this moment, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time and views a war movie in reverse. It’s a misguided hope, of sorts. Because I still believe that peace and prosperity are a possibility. I, too, am a fool.
"American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter plans flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
"The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
"When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
"The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed."
Happy Armistice Day.
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