Happy Armistice Day!
It’s the “eleventh day of the eleventh month”, when we mark Armistice Day, the day hostilities on the Western Front of WWI ceased. Today is celebrated all over the world. If you see people wearing poppies around this time of year, it’s in reference to the poem “In Flanders Fields“.
We celebrated Armistice Day here in the US, until we changed it to be “Veterans Day” during the height of the Cold War. The reasons in the resolution was to honor the veterans of all wars, not just WWI.
But there’s a strange subtle shift here, when it was Armistice Day, we were celebrating peace, with the hope that war is just an aberration to the norm. Then we shifted from celebrating peace to celebrating the soldiers. It’s definitely good to celebrate the sacrifices of soldiers, but it seems like peace should have its day too.
Remember, there’s a lot in a name. We used to have a “Department of War”, then it was briefly called the “National Military Establishment”, before it became the “Department of Defense”. Noodle on that for a while. ;-)
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