I don’t believe your toasts to “absent comrades”

Although I was in London this summer while they were abuilding, I made a point of not going to see the poppies. (Here’s a great description of them, though, by a fellow Armitage fan.)

I’m a bureaucrat now so I not only have the day off from work, I am also not grading or doing research or thinking I can use this 24 hours to catch up. Great day for me. I slept two additional hours and now I get to write.

But first, Veterans’ Day. I’ve written about it every year. Every year I hear about the war to end all wars. Every year I pray for an end to war.

When I was a little girl, and the last men were just home from Vietnam, the VFW sold paper poppies that looked like this one for a quarter. You could buy one as you walked into a grocery store or a bank. Not sure what they used the money for. You wrapped the green strand, which usually a very light form of wire, around your collar button.

When I was a teenager we had an assembly in school at the eleven hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month and we read “Flanders Fields” and there was a color guard appearance and we stood for a moment of silence.

We honored everyone’s sacrifices. Then we went off to fourth hour to practice the quadratic formula.

But honestly — is thinking about something really honoring it? If we think about it for ten minutes and then it’s over?

While I was driving to my café of choice this morning I listened to a BBC report about the situation in Syria. 1,500 more U.S. troops are going to Iraq. Didn’t we withdraw from Iraq? Oh, yeah, my bad. There are still 24,500 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan although we withdrew from there, too.

In the café, as I write, the Navy ROTC kids — because now I am of the age that they could be my kids — are wearing some form of a summer dress uniform and buying coffee after their ceremonial obligations have ended. Their fellow students had the luxury of staying home. They’re debating whether it’s too cold to go to the beach, and if they should stay home and study this afternoon. I think of my student who went to Afghanistan once and almost twice and then didn’t go. He did get to OCS and he graduated, after which I lost track of him. Nothing against Asia, but I hope he’s not there now.

Let’s remember our relatives who were and are veterans. I have many relatives who have served and I do that. My mother’s grandfather. His relative whose tomb we stumbled over recently. Neither of my grandfathers, for some reason, but five of my father’s nine uncles, two of my mother’s three. My father and both my uncles. Three of my four first cousins.

I respect what they did for us, for me.

But I’m done kidding myself that remembering them — dead or alive — honors their sacrifices.

It doesn’t matter if people write poems about the war and the war dead that make us proud or make us cry.

It doesn’t matter if we put the words and the poppies on the bodies of our children —

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A child (Tex Jacks) reads In Flanders Fields at a war memorial in Spooks 7.1. My cap.

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or our actors —

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Richard Armitage wears a “Remembrance Day” poppy on ITV’s This Morning during the Spooks 7 promotional blitz, October 27, 2008.

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or if the actors recite the poems — this one is taken so egregiously out of context these days that Chelsea Clinton had it read at her wedding —

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or even if the actors also participate personally in the commemoration or express their sympathy with it:

‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them’ pic.twitter.com/5ThJ6sxcXp

— Richard Armitage (@RCArmitage) November 9, 2014

Nothing changes.

I’m not criticizing anyone to whom the Veterans’ Day pieties mean something. My family has its shares of corpses and casualties to war. I do not seek to minimize anyone’s sacrifice or the personal memories of our loved ones. But at the same time, I say: Please don’t give me “never again” if we’re not going to try honestly for never again. If it’s only a moment of silence during a toast to “absent comrades” — spare me. If we want to honor their sacrifices, let us make sure that no one has to make those sacrifices ever again.

A Veterans’ Day on which we are industriously engaged in making more veterans? Let’s take care of the ones we already have created.

War does not end war. Only peace ends war. We are the only ones who can make war — and we are also the only ones who can make peace.

~ by Servetus on November 11, 2014.