Forgetting Remembrance Day

A year ago we posted this on November 11. We can't think of another way to say the same thing, so we'll just say it again the same way we did last year.

Alas:

Today is called Veterans Day in the United States, but everywhere else it is Remembrance Day. When we were young it celebrated the end of shooting and was still Armistice Day. Now it celebrates the melancholy fact that young people have again picked up guns, not that they were at last able to put them down on the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month in 1918.

The change came during the Cold War. In 1954 we forgot Remembrance Day. Veterans Day does not honor fallen soldiers. That's Memorial Day. Veterans Day is about those who survive their service. Given how we treat them in this country, we should call it Forgetting Day. Once they have served their purpose our current government abandons them.

To remember Armistice Day, the Day the Guns Stopped, here is Edna St. Vincent Millay's great poem:

CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR (I SHALL DIE)

I shall die
but that is all
I shall do for Death

I hear him leading his horse out of the stall
I hear the clatter on the barn floor
He is in haste
he has business in Cuba
business in the Balkans
Many calls to make this morning
But I will not hold the bridle while he cinches the girth
And he may mount by himself
I will not give him a leg up

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip
I will not tell him which way the fox ran
And with his hoof on my breast
I will not tell him where the black boy hides in the swamp

I shall die
but that is all
that I shall do for Death
I am not on his payroll

I will not tell him the whereabouts of my enemies either
Though he promises me much
I will not map him the route to any man's door
Am I a spy in the land of the living
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe with me
Never through me shall you be overcome

I shall die
but that is all
I shall do for Death

The Reveres, Armistice Day, 2006 and again on Armistice Day, 2007