Better than I could say it

[pecunium]

I've taken, as I look at it, to annually saying Veteran's Day is a holiday which means not much to me.

I try to articulate why I prefer Armistice Day, but I fail.

Over at Orcinus Sara Robinson (an American, now living in Canada) hits it out of the park (the folks at Lawyers, Guns and Money do a good job too).

That part in the beginning, about how The Great War shaped Canada... I understand that. I was a strange child, I read a lot. I read a lot of history. My grandfather's being in WW1 is part of why I read so much about that war, which is practically forgotten here (Yankee Division, a Scout/Sniper, which meant company runner. He only lost one message. He was required to take it back to HQ, somehow it disappeared, only to turn up in a chest of drawers in Cleveland. It starts, "On the Eleventh Hour, of the Eleventh Day, of the Eleventh Month, of the Year 1918...).

In high school I read, "Generals Die in Bed", which is the Canadian novel of the Great War (combine that with "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Goodbye to All That" and the poetry of Blunden, Seeger, Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg and Brooke, and "Memoirs of An Infantry Officer." and the sense of place is strong. "A Farewell to Arms" left me flat). It was moving, in a more restrained way than "Storm of Steel", or "Johnny Got His Gun".

Canada, it seems, has not forgotten why we have a holiday on 11 Nov.

Anyway, go read those posts, and don't forget the comments.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Did you watch the video of A Pittance of Time that I posted? I think it says a lot about the Canadian experience of Remembrance Day.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No, I didn't.

Last summer, when I got to play with the Territorials, I got a small taste of it, because they had a remembrance for the Tube bombing from the year before.

I'll go look at it.

TK

[goshawk.livejournal.com]

Remembrance Day (Armistice Day) has always been a deeply important...I hesitate to say "holiday". Perhaps "observance" is better--for me, and for all those close to me. I grew up with every business and school closed on the eleventh, a week of projects and readings in school beforehand, and communities gathered. It was a shock to me when I learned from American friends that it wasn't such a big deal south of the border.

This past Sunday was my first Remembrance Day in uniform. It was very different--it felt less personal and private and far more a part of something larger than me. No doubt this was influenced by the fact that the uniform seems to make people want to talk to you and listen to you as they might not an average twenty-something. The veterans especially--which is fascinating, with the stories they share.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the uniform changes everything.

It is a holiday, in the original sense of the word. I think part of what bothers me is it ought to be that sense of dread importance. It's needs to be solemn, and it's not.

I, as me, shouldn't matter. It's not about "service" (that's why we have Memorial Day" it's not about, "sacrifice", it needs to be about something bigger than people.

America has lost that.

TK

p.s. "The stories they share,", yeah, a uniform (and for me, a combat patch) changes the nature of the stories they share.

[ltsk.livejournal.com]

I'd read the links, but I'm at work. Your post did remind me, however, of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut quotes, from Breakfast of Champions:

When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover 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.

When my family lived in the suburbs of Washington, DC, my parents took my brother and I to Arlington National Cemetary and the Vietnam Memorial Wall every Veteran's Day. When we moved to Connecticut, we stopped observing the holiday like we used to, I think because there was nowhere to go that had the same impact and/or ceremony.

[ltsk.livejournal.com]

And of course, I finally check out one of your links in a previous post, and there's the quote. *sigh*