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pecuniumIt's been 91 years since 11 Nov. became a date of fame. It's been 95 since the start of the reason that date became so known, to so much of the world.
In the States we've made it into, "Veterans' Day", which appalls me. We have a tradition of that. Memorial Day was, originally to recall the dead of the US Civil War.
Which is what so galls me about the change in this day. It wasn't about us. It's not about the veterans, not the living, not the dead. Not the famous ones, like Roger Young, nor the lesser known like Michael Vega or even the mytholgised, like Willie McBride.
It's about life, and death and the birth of hope.
War, I suspect, like poverty will be always with us, but for a brief chunk of time a huge part of the world thought they might manage to keep alive the horror of this war, to prevent the horror of another one. Go to Google Canada and be reminded that this isn't a US holiday. In Britian, they had two minutes of silence, broadcast from The Cenotaph, in Canada they do much the same today.
Yes, they have incorporated all the dead, of all their wars, but the poppies on the field, and in the lapels, and on Google.ca today all point to that moment, the moment in 1918 when the guns fell silent, when men could again rise up from the mud of their giant living grave and look to each other as people, not targets.
My campus, where I am writing this, has lots of hummocks, where the spoil from flattening the hill to put classrooms has been heaped. I can look from the first one I come to when I am done mounting the steps to the top, and see to the one before the library buiding I am in now. It's about 200 yards; which is about the furthest the front lines were.
It's the space across, "no man's land". The gap which millions of men failed to cross, in more than 4 years of killing and dying. 200 bloody yards.
The little hillocks make it more real than any attempt I've tried in the past. Seeing it as rolling ground, limited in sight by buildings, and isolated from expanse by virtue of no more land than the 1/2 mile of the hilltop keeps the far distance from making the battlefields of Verdun, the Somme, Belleau Wood, Passchendaele, Gallipoli, and all the lesser names, known but to those who lived in them, real.
600,000 men died in trying to get across the Somme battlefield. I look across 200 yards and I can't imagine 20,000, much less that 20,000 died in the first day.
And we've lost that. We make it about, "veterans", which perverts it twice. Not only does it lose the sense of hope and remembrance which was meant when we declared a holiday to remember the Armistice, it also shifts the focus to living people. I can go to Applebee's and get a free lunch, or to Knott's Berry Farm and get in for free.
Big Whoop. It's not about me. It's about not needing to sing this again.
In the States we've made it into, "Veterans' Day", which appalls me. We have a tradition of that. Memorial Day was, originally to recall the dead of the US Civil War.
Which is what so galls me about the change in this day. It wasn't about us. It's not about the veterans, not the living, not the dead. Not the famous ones, like Roger Young, nor the lesser known like Michael Vega or even the mytholgised, like Willie McBride.
It's about life, and death and the birth of hope.
War, I suspect, like poverty will be always with us, but for a brief chunk of time a huge part of the world thought they might manage to keep alive the horror of this war, to prevent the horror of another one. Go to Google Canada and be reminded that this isn't a US holiday. In Britian, they had two minutes of silence, broadcast from The Cenotaph, in Canada they do much the same today.
Yes, they have incorporated all the dead, of all their wars, but the poppies on the field, and in the lapels, and on Google.ca today all point to that moment, the moment in 1918 when the guns fell silent, when men could again rise up from the mud of their giant living grave and look to each other as people, not targets.
My campus, where I am writing this, has lots of hummocks, where the spoil from flattening the hill to put classrooms has been heaped. I can look from the first one I come to when I am done mounting the steps to the top, and see to the one before the library buiding I am in now. It's about 200 yards; which is about the furthest the front lines were.
It's the space across, "no man's land". The gap which millions of men failed to cross, in more than 4 years of killing and dying. 200 bloody yards.
The little hillocks make it more real than any attempt I've tried in the past. Seeing it as rolling ground, limited in sight by buildings, and isolated from expanse by virtue of no more land than the 1/2 mile of the hilltop keeps the far distance from making the battlefields of Verdun, the Somme, Belleau Wood, Passchendaele, Gallipoli, and all the lesser names, known but to those who lived in them, real.
600,000 men died in trying to get across the Somme battlefield. I look across 200 yards and I can't imagine 20,000, much less that 20,000 died in the first day.
And we've lost that. We make it about, "veterans", which perverts it twice. Not only does it lose the sense of hope and remembrance which was meant when we declared a holiday to remember the Armistice, it also shifts the focus to living people. I can go to Applebee's and get a free lunch, or to Knott's Berry Farm and get in for free.
Big Whoop. It's not about me. It's about not needing to sing this again.
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-11 08:26 pm (UTC)