November 11 is Veteran’s Day– Armistice or Remembrance Day in Britain. This began as a day to remember those who served and died in World War I. In the US, it has become a day to remember our living veterans of all our wars, as well as those who died in WWI. This is a holy day as far as I’m concerned. We live in the tatters of a world shaped and defined by what happened from 1914-1918, though in the US at least, there isn’t even a national memorial for that particular war. We didn’t lose as many people, not even as close as Britain and France (though we did send an expeditionary force to Europe under General Pershing over in 1917. My 1stcousin twice removed private S. Wesley Heffner (30 April 1898-June 1918) died in France of injuries sustained in battle. I remember him every November). In Britain, entire villages were emptied of men. It cost the UK an entire generation and devastated Europe. Young men tended to enlist together, and villages were posted in the same battalions together so when those battalions fell in battle, they took the men of entire villages and towns with them.

America doesn’t do anything approaching enough to honor this day. The president may lay a wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier at Arlington Cemetery. Individual towns may have small ceremonies at their local American Legion halls but we no longer have large, city wide parades, or events. We have chosen to forget, and this is shameful. Maybe if we remembered and honored a bit more assiduously, we wouldn’t be so quick to go to war, or so slow to intervene when it is right to do so.

The UK is also having problems this year. In London, numerous Pro-Palestinian groups have decided to hold marches on Remembrance Day. I’m sure we’ll see the same type of garbage here. In this, I don’t care if a march is Pro-Palestinian or Pro-Israeli, or Pro- anything else: it is inappropriate to hold such a thing on a day given to remember our honored dead, especially our WWI dead. Their ghosts still haunt London. You can sense them, feel them in the streets, right along with the ghosts of WWII holding us, their descendants accountable. To do this on Remembrance Day, to hold these pro-Palestinian marches (or any other kind of march that isn’t dedicated to remembrance) is disgusting and gross. Personally, if a group decides to march on Veteran’s Day/Remembrance Day, I’d like to see forcible police action, arrest, and frankly, I’d strip the ingrates of their citizenship and remove them from the country. Or conscript them and send them to the front line of any pertinent war. Teach them a lesson about why we should be grateful to our military dead.

To insult the dead that gave their lives that we might live in freedom is …I don’t have words for how abhorrent that is, especially on Armistice Day. It’s utterly revolting and if the police won’t handle the ingrates, then I hope the people themselves do. That we allow any other type of march to occur on this day shows the utter lack of respect with which we hold our military dead.

I’ll close with a stanza from Binyon’s poignant tribute to the WWI fallen:

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

It is our privilege and our obligation to remember and with remembrance to carry in our hearts reverence. Always. If we can’t do that, what a pathetic generation of human beings we are.