Veterans' Day Musing
Today was (if memory serves) the first Veterans' Day I have had off in 30 years. I spent it as I suspect many veterans did: puttering and doing errands.
What one does not and cannot understand, if one is not a veteran with some share of interesting times, is that being able to putter and do errands is a particular treat on this particular day.
I note with sardonic interest that Veterans' Day is cool again, since we decided shooting up other countries was good foreign policy. If you're not a veteran, Veterans' Day and Memorial Day, both monuments to far-off wars, are two days a year when you can be sloppily sentimental about "our heroes." This enables you to justify giving them the finger the other 363 days of the year.
What say we skip the holidays and simply pay veterans back with pensions and disability benefits where appropriate, and with the affordable health care that has long been supposed to be part of the deal when you sign on the dotted line?
Oh never mind: I forgot that breaking promises is part of what makes the American Dream the American Delusion.
What one does not and cannot understand, if one is not a veteran with some share of interesting times, is that being able to putter and do errands is a particular treat on this particular day.
I note with sardonic interest that Veterans' Day is cool again, since we decided shooting up other countries was good foreign policy. If you're not a veteran, Veterans' Day and Memorial Day, both monuments to far-off wars, are two days a year when you can be sloppily sentimental about "our heroes." This enables you to justify giving them the finger the other 363 days of the year.
What say we skip the holidays and simply pay veterans back with pensions and disability benefits where appropriate, and with the affordable health care that has long been supposed to be part of the deal when you sign on the dotted line?
Oh never mind: I forgot that breaking promises is part of what makes the American Dream the American Delusion.
posted by Uncle | 23:30
2 Comments:
I guess we Boomers are the last to see the huge Armistice Day parades. Here in Beantown, they didn't have enough to parade for the first time since WWI and had a little ceremony at City Hall Plaza.
Word is that VFWs and AMVETs are struggling and closing. Those were the only places where my granddad could get a beer and swap lies with other WWI and WWII types in his dry town.
Certainly the Nam and Iraq soldiers have little interest in ossifying on red plastic covered stools with glass-brick filtered light.
I find it troubling that I can easily remember parades that included Spanish-American war veterans, then as old as WWII vets now are. That's another story that generally convinces the younger generation that I'm lying and really did see dinosaurs in the backyard while growing up. W.W. Williams, long purported to be the last Civil War veteran, who died when I was 12, has been debunked. I feel rather deprived by that.
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