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, and when Dwayne Hoover 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 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.
Gotta say, it's really surreal working at a childcare center where we can't even talk directly about Halloween for fear that certain families might not celebrate it, but have no problem talking to kids (like, 3-year-old kids) about a day that celebrates "the people protecting our freedom" totally uncritically.
I certainly wouldn't deny that there's good reason for Veteran's Day writ large, I just think it's a really strange thing to be celebrating with kids this young. It's hard to get into the concept of a just war with 3-year-olds, let alone give a decent, age-appropriate answer to 'what do soldiers do now' ("try and help people" was the best I could do). But maybe my hackles are just raised from my last job, where I genuinely had a parent complain that "Paw Patrol" was fascist brainwashing. Also had a kid who watched footage of WWII bombings with his dad, and then unsurprisingly spent a lot of time air-raiding his classmates with pinecones. Somewhere in the middle is a reasonable stance, just not sure what it is myself.