A Thought on Veterans Day

So, in the US it’s Veteran’s Day again.

A Veteran’s Thoughts on Veteran’s Day

As readers of this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads (CLBTNR) know, we have some problems with war memorials and war related holidays.

Today somebody or other pointed at Kurt Vonnegut’s book, Breakfast of Champions (emphasis added):

“… November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I 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.

Before you think this too woke, I remind you that Vonnegut himself was a veteran of World War II, whose horrific experiences as a prisoner in Dresden during the fire-bombing led to his book Slaughterhouse Five. Guy knows whereof he speaks.

It’s the peacemaking of Armistice Day we should remember, and peacemakers we should honor.

One example I like is the end of the Colombian civil war with the FARC guerrillas. After something like 60 years of intractable civil war, they desperately reached out to MullenLowe, an advertising agency. As these videos show, they used shared religious community symbols to invite guerrillas back into society without penalty:

• One year, they put Christmas trees in the jungle that would suddenly light up at night when approached. If you’re a guerrilla marching at night in the jungle and something lights up, it usually means you’re about to die. These trees lit up and said, “If Christmas can come to the jungle, you can come home.” It was awesomely effective at demobilizing a large fraction of the FARC force.
• The next year, after learning from demobilizees that they moved mostly on the river at night, they put thousands of small blue lights in plastic bubbles with little toys and invitations to come home in the rivers. Guerrillas picked them up, read the invitations, and took them.
• The next year, they dropped thousands of lighted plastic balls which said “Walk toward the beacons, we are ready there to have you come home.” Then they set up big spotlight beacons pointed at the sky, and embraced anyone who came out of the jungle.

These always bring me to tears of elevation.

They did not threaten the FARC partisans. They offered food, medical care, housing, education, job training, and reuniting with their families.

They wanted to be peacemakers, so that’s how they made peace.

The Weekend Conclusion

War is an occasional but ugly necessity, which we should make as rare as possible. Peace is an eternal but sacred necessity, which we should make as constant as possible.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarceranda est!)

(Et ceterum censeo, index Epsteiniani divulganda est!)

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Notes & References

Nope.