"Thank you to all the Veterans and Soliders that continue to risk their lives for my freedom, may God forever bless you and your family."
Originally posted on NJ.com by Star-Ledger Editorial Board
Veterans Day is about remembering — remembering those who went to war for us, especially those who didn’t come back. But in the hurly-burly of life today, we too often forget to remember.
Americans of a certain age can still recall the parades and pageantry, the red poppies and grand speeches that marked Veterans Day (earlier Armistice Day) in the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s and into the 1960s. But that was a different era.
The two world wars they celebrated were noble wars. The sons those Gold Star mothers gave to their country died for lofty ideals that rallied the entire nation — freedom, liberty and an end to barbarous dictatorships. There was no talk of an “exit strategy” in those years. Every family had someone in service.
That’s all gone. The wars we’ve fought for almost 60 years now have been political wars, beginning with Korea, a forgotten conflict denied even the label of “war.” It was merely a “police action,” but also an inferno that consumed 35,000 American lives in three years.
The men didn’t cheer and the boys didn’t shout and the ladies and girls didn’t all turn out when Johnny came marching home from Korea. To be honest, there was little to celebrate then — or later in Vietnam or Bosnia or in our endless political wars in the Middle East. All the grand rhetoric and patriotic prose of the old days would ring hollow today.
But perhaps the worst part of what’s happened to Veterans Day is the gap that has grown up in 21st century America between our military — some say the best we ever fielded, certainly the best trained and equipped — and the American people.
The reason is plain enough. This isn’t a military of all the people drawn by lot in a national draft as in the two world wars, Korea or Vietnam, with almost everyone subject to call. It’s a volunteer force in which only a tiny segment of the population serves. And their fighting and dying is for too many of us more an abstraction than a flesh-and-blood reality.
Go to a Veterans Day parade or speech today? We’d rather go shopping.
The era of the gala parades and fine Veterans Day oratory may be over, but still, even a modest remembrance would be nice. The simple British Remembrance Day salute might serve as an example. After lights are dimmed and a period of silence observed, this verse from “For The Fallen,” by Laurence Binyon, least known of Britain’s World War I poets, is read every year:
“They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old/Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn/At the going down of the sun and in the morning/we will remember them.”
We should do no less.
