My Veterans / Armistice Day Wish

Image by Defence Images via FlickrOn Veterans / Armistice Day

I honor all those who served and who still do - as well as their families and loved ones.

I fervently pray we be rightly led to better resolve conflicts in peaceful ways. Also that we may learn to work as hard toward a goal of global harmony and a renewed respect of life as we do now toward conflict.

I hope we all take a minute of silent reflection at eleven minutes after 11 AM.

I hope we can use this day as time of reexamination of jaded justifications and the obscene outcomes of war. All too frequently those justifications have been morally insufficient to vindicate the international conflicts to which our veterans gave so much.

Primarily, I hope our great nations devote equally heartfelt and solemn attention to the cessation of existing wars and to the prevention of similar calamities in the decades to come.

"…November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy all the people of all the nations which fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I've talked to old men who were on the battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veteran's Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veteran's Day is not…Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things." -- Kurt Vonnegut