Today is Veteran’s Day, November 11th.
Today we commemorate the
anniversary of the end of World War I, The Great War, the war to end all wars, we were told,
though regrettably it was not.
I am a veteran, as is my father
and some few of my friends (a very few).
From the end of World War I, until
1954, we celebrated this day as Armistice Day, as a remembrance of that moment
in that first great-global-conflict, when the fighting stopped along the lines,
and in the trenches at the fronts.
The end of the conflict was
choreographed, like a dance.
It stopped suddenly, it stopped
all at once.
It came to a halt at the eleventh
hour, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month; as if the war had a director who
yelled “cut!” And all the actors on the stage, all the pawns in the field, all the
millions of people in their graves could get up from what they were doing and go
home.
That is not what happened.
That never happens.
Nearly twenty million people were
killed in World War I, twenty million families broken, with many millions more
suffering in the aftermath.
World War I was perceived by those
who endured it as so horrible that it
would end war itself, end it for all time, but that would not be the case.
The gods of war are busy, always
The conflicts they sew never end, not
ever
We hunger and we thirst for war
It is the constant
failure of humanity
Today is the feast of Saint Martin
of Tours, the patron saint of soldiers; St. Martin of the Sword.
Saint Martin was the first
Christian Soldier.
It was in recognition of him, and
his feast that this date was selected to bring World War I to a close.
It might have come sooner for the
soldiers in the struggle, but the politicians acting like art directors wanted
to wait for a symbolic moment to bring the curtain down.
11:11:11
The eleventh hour of the eleventh
day of the eleventh month, it was easy to remember.
Pope, Saint Gregory the Great, the
man who gave us the modern calendar, he was the man who penned Saint Martin’s
hagiography. Most of Gregory’s hagiographical writings were works of fiction,
either cut from whole cloth, or steeped and dyed from a the barest scintilla of
truth. It is not likely that Martin of Tours ever lived, much less true are the
reports of the many miracles he performed.
All the great Popes were great
prevaricators, and great recipients of the penchant for falsehood.
Even if the life of Saint Martin
was based on the life of a real person, his hagiography is a fiction and our
celebration of him is a piece of propaganda, it is just another terrible lie, a
fable penned with a terrible purpose; through it Pope Saint Gregory gave
permission for Christians to takes up arms.
He gave Christian soldiers leave
to march to war, a vocation which had been theretofore forbidden to the
followers of Jesus, and a matter of deep contention in the Church.
The spirits of conflict have a
will of their own…their will is bound like the double helix within our human
nature.
There is no god of war, there are
only human pretenders.
In 1954, President Eisenhower, the
man who had been the Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, changed the
nature of the November 11th holiday; changing the name from Armistice
Day to Veteran’s Day, in honor of all Veterans who had fought in any conflict,
anywhere in the world.
Friend or foe, ally or adversary,
we celebrate the courage of the average person, woman or man, who was willing
to risk everything for their tribe, their nation or their clan.
That is what we celebrate today on
Veteran’s Day.
We do not celebrate the end of
war, because it seems that war itself will never end.
We do not celebrate the fictional
life of a fictional saint, whose usefulness as a tool of propaganda promoted
the idea that it was not only possible to serve Jesus with a sword, but
laudable, and we do not celebrate the lie that peace could ever be the fruit of
war.
The fruit of peace springs from a
different seed altogether: from tolerance and mercy, compassion and humility...and
justice, true justice.
What we celebrate today is the
character of those men and women who have had the courage to enlist, to risk
their lives for the sake of their sisters and brothers, whether at home or
beside them in the field.
We should always celebrate that
quality of character, while simultaneously naming the flaws in our own that
lead us to war; fear and greed, anger and hatred, all of our calamitous
attributes.
The spirits of conflict have a
will of their own…the children of Aries; Fear, Panic and Strife, they own a
piece of us, they reside in each of us.
We are possessed.
One hundred years after the end of
World War I, we are still waging war all around the world. We the United States
of America are waging war in Afghanistan, in Africa, selling weapons to Saudi
Arabia, who is fighting a war by proxy with Iran in Yemen, and we are feeding
other conflicts in every sector of the globe.
We are the greatest arms dealers
in the world and every bullet we sell is a shiny little example of our failure.
I served in the Navy as a Hospital
Corpsman, from 1990 – 1994.
I served during the first Gulf
War, though I did not serve in the theatre of combat where we killed 300,000
Iraqi people in the space of a few months.
My father served for twenty-two
years; the first four as a Marine, the next eighteen in the Air Force. Our
nation went to war once during that time, in Southeast Asia where my father
served multiple tours of duty, a war in which we killed over 3,000,000 people
of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
We have killed millions more in
many other nations in the decades since then, leaving millions of families
broken.
We are terrible, profligate
killers, we are experts at it, we Americans.
Today The President of the United
States participated in a ceremony that honors the lives of fallen soldiers, a
man who never served, who lied to avoid the draft, a man without a shred of
honor.
Earlier this year he ordered
soldiers to disperse crowds of protesters peacefully assembled in front of the White
House, they used chemical irritants and horses to move the crowd, all so he
could have a political photo-op in front of Church across the street.
He assembled his generals to
participate in it as a show of force.
He ordered the Defense Department
to draw up plans to use the United States Military against the American People
under the authority of the insurrection act because he feared widespread
protest of his failure to govern.
His top generals and defense secretary
made public statement that they would not allow the United States armed forces
to be drawn into the president’s political conflicts. After loosing his bid for
re-election he fired the Secretary of Defense and put a political crony in his
place.
It remains true that every bullet
we fire, every missile we launch, each of them is an admission of our failure
as diplomats and as human beings.
Violence does not beget peace. Violence
it begets violence; it will always be that way. Only peace and reconciliation can
bring about peace reconciliation.
Love one another; pay respect to
the inherent dignity of every human being, regardless of your disagreements,
regardless of the pain you are carrying from your past. This is the way out of
conflict.
To be free from the repercussions
of our history of violence requires that we forgive one another and seek
forgiveness for ourselves.
If you want to honor our Veteran’s
then commit yourself to meet conflict with love, respect all people, even your
adversary, this is the thanks you can give to a Veteran today.
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