Veterans Day

 

Today is Veterans Day. It is minimally observed in the U.S., but as Remembrance Day it still has greater salience in the U.K and the Commonwealth. For sheer ceremonial splendor, the annual observance at London's Cenotaph on the second Sunday of November is probably the most outstanding, incorporating as it does participation by the King, the royal family, present and past prime ministers and other politicians, the military, veterans, the clergy, and the public more broadly. More simply but very movingly, I remember the universal observance of the minute-of-silence. along with the universal wearing of poppies, when I served in a parish in Canada in the late 1990s. It hardly speaks well for the U.S. that this day can pass largely unnoticed for many in this country.

As I have noted on many similar occasions, Remembering is one of the things that makes us so distinctly human. To remember those who have died is to acknowledge the importance of their lives - and the common humanity which we share with them in life and in death. Remembering is also one of the things that especially makes us Christian. To remember those who have gone before us in faith is to celebrate the multitude of ways in which the grace of God touched and transformed each one of them in life - and the hope which we still share with them after death.

On this Veterans' Day, I am particularly mindful of my father and my uncles who served in World War II and that whole "greatest generation," whose collective experience of sacrifice helped create the productive and more egalitarian society in which my generation grew up. One must also be mindful of those members of my cohort whose lives were so sadly cut short by war and the members of more recent generations who have served and sacrificed, often in wars which lacked the rationale or public support the World War II generation experienced.

The abolition of the military draft, whatever else it accomplished, served the cynical purpose of diminishing the previously widespread experience of and public identification with national service. The majority of citizens no longer experience what the ancients considered the primary responsibility of citizenship, transforming citizenship from a responsibility to a consumer-like claim to rights and privileges. It has also significantly privatized the sad experience of death, disablement, bereavement, and loss, now borne disproportionately by only certain Americans. Finally, it has also separated citizens from one another, whereas the former experience of serving alongside fellow citizens of different regions, religions, races, and ethnicities brought Americans together in a common cause. One wonders whether we would be experiencing the same degree of xenophobia and fear of difference if more of us had been exposed to one another as the World War II and Cold War generations were in military service?