a bit of remembrance

I admit I’m glad to have the day after tomorrow off. I wouldn’t mind a quiet morning at home to… I don’t know… do some of my neglected cleaning or get ready for dinner guests on Friday… or maybe I’ll even just sloth around on the couch for a few hours. I’m not complaining that I have an extra day to make that choice. I don’t even mind that it isn’t attached to the weekend. 

Although, I had a conversation with someone who said Veteran’s Day is a holiday that doesn’t make sense. Because it isn’t convenient to have to take pause during the week and then go back to the work week for a day. Why not just attach it to Sunday and make life easier? Hell, some people don’t even use this day. They just take it as a floater to extend Thanksgiving into a four day weekend.

Um… yeah, I get that. I also get the fact that I am going to log onto Facebook on Thursday and see a dozen or so statuses that say so and so remembers all who gave their lives and made the ultimate sacrifice blah blah blah blah. Good. It’s good to think of those things… in a Facebook status.

Maybe the point of it interrupting the week is to remind us that war is never convenient. Seriously, fighting over no man’s land didn’t take pause for banking hours. Although… there were some odd bits of chivalry in the outset of the war… but that was before America bothered to notice and participate. And once they did, well… it wasn’t convenient. It got in the way of a lot of things, a lot of productivity, a lot of living. Indeed, once it ended, living was never the same again.

And that’s what Veteran’s Day was initially. Armistice Day. The day the First World War ended. But I’m assuming you know that, even if you don’t think about it. About the fact that this whole country was holding its breath over yellow telegrams and the empty chairs at dinner tables so the world was made safe for democracy. Maybe that was a foolish rally cry. Maybe the war overall was a ridiculous attempt at ruling the western hemisphere. Maybe it didn’t really even end on November 11th. But, for a few decades, anyway, people could start to heal again and go back to a normal life without headlines of trenches and mustard gas and submarines lurking under the Atlantic Ocean.

But that was… generations past. Even my grandmother who was a child of one of those veterans can’t tell me what the world was like on that day. Or why the country decided to freeze time to pay tribute, to remember.

Except, we’ve had a few more wars since then. Millions more casualties. Millions more survivors who come back to this country with things they can never forget, even if they don’t want to remember. And we say, okay, yeah, we’ll remember for a few minutes on this day in November, right before we go back our Internet and football games and political bickering and total, complete oblivion.

And maybe we shouldn’t have to live with it in our every day. We were born into this generation, not the one a hundred years ago… and yet… we are in a generation of war. A generation of veterans neglected by our preoccupation with whatever celebrity is doing who and whatever television show is singing and dancing now. 

We give them a day… and yet, we take that day for ourselves. To sleep later. To clean the bathroom. To be lazy in front of the television. To complain about the fact we have to go back to work on Friday.

They gave us every day. Every day for the rest of their whole lives.