Today is Veterans' Day. Many of us in the United States of America are veterans, and some of us were even fortunate enough to be Marines, hoorah...but...
I worry, and I wonder. I worry about my brother Marines in Iraq: I want them to come back here, back to America, safe and whole (I have clients in Iraq, not Marines, but soldiers in the US Army: I worry about them, too). And I wonder about my fellow Americans, patriotic people who observe Veterans' Day with the best, most honest intentions.
I wonder because I can recall finding out, as a boy, that the holiday was once called Armistice Day, and it was a celebration of the armistice which ended the fighting of World War I. How limited, I thought to myself. How quaint. Interesting, as is much of history, but...how narrow was the thinking back then.
I bring this up because for years now I have felt that a holiday which celebrates an armistice -- if not peace, at least a cessation of fighting -- is not quaint or limited, but good. I'm not a war hero myself and I sport no personal combat or valor decorations on my uniforms or on my DD214, but I was in Beirut in '83-84 and came out of there with a Combat Action Ribbon and a conviction that wars were bad things, bad things every time.
Mind you, that doesn't make me a pacifist: if war is a bad thing, then being attacked and offering no defense is even worse. I never thought the slogan "Peace through superior firepower" was simplistic or pro-war, for example. To me, it made perfectly logical, practical, philosophical sense.
But it also makes sense for us to stop and think about what we're doing. Okay, Armistice Day is now gone -- not as gone as Decoration Day, true, but it's been renamed Veterans' Day, and, as Anthony Gregory writes, the change was made with the best of motives. But it's still a change. Was it a positive change?
If you answer that it was, then here's my challenge to you: without looking it up, without asking an expert, just tell me -- What is the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans' Day? Do you know? Do you know anyone who knows? If not, then why do we have two such holidays, explicitly celebrating military service? Again, I'm no pacifist, but we don't have a Mark Twain holiday, or a Thomas Jefferson holiday, or an Aaron Copland or Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Armstrong holiday.
Just tell me, without looking it up: what's the difference, and why two holidays?
(And for those of you in uniform, especially at sea or in the thick of things: yeah, I think you're worthy of a holiday.)
Posted by Craig Ceely at November 11, 2004 12:02 AMOne is to honor the dead.
The other honors the living.
Me, I've got zero problem honoring both on two different days.
Posted by: Ian Hamet at November 11, 2004 09:59 AM