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Nov. 11th, 2014 09:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gen_is_goneSo leaving aside the bit where I haven't been doing shit for school, for NaNo, for any fannish projects, etc., let's jump right in and pretend the conversation already started.
Today is a strange day for me, the same way September eleventh is strange and May twenty-fifth is strange, and the anniversaries of D-Day are strange. It's strange, and perhaps somewhat offensive, to see Veterans' Day (Armistice Day, Remembrance Day) commercialized, though thankfully my college apartment's lack of television meant I didn't see any ads this year. It's never bothered me that Christmas is as commercialized as it is. This might just be my personal relationship (or not) with the religion around the modern holiday, but it makes sense that feast days be commercialized, if everything else will be. As long as there feast days, there will be someone willing to sell you the feast, or at least some trappings pertaining to it.
But Veterans' Day isn't a feast day. 9/11 isn't a feast day and really, neither is the Glorious 25th. 'Happy Veterans' Day' has the same jarring false note to it as 'Happy Twenty-Fifth of May' and while I imagine there are plenty of people likely to be offended at my inclusion of a fictional date with these others, that one's for my grandparents, though I suppose they all are, really. Grandpa was born the year of the Armistice, and the Great War wasn't his war, but the hope that this peace would lead to the end of wars, or at least the cessation of this one, and the Treaty that pretty directly lead to the one he shed blood and muscle for, looms in history to this day, 96 years on, one hundred years since this war began.
I admit my failings yet again. I don't know my history well enough. I don't have the authority to speak. But this day, and a few other days, I think of my grandparents, and this day, specifically, I think of others' grandparents. It's not a holiday in the sense we (Americans, but maybe not exclusively Americans) tend to think of the word, but it is a holy day. Blood was shed to get to this day, before it and after, and the First World War was not the war to end all wars. So maybe think of veterans today, alive or long since dead, and maybe spare some grief from our seemingly endless well for the millions who died in this war, maybe keep believing in that desperate, exhausted, horrified hope for peace.
(And I don't have an icon with a poppy. I have the September eleventh memorial, a signifier for grief and remembrance.)
Today is a strange day for me, the same way September eleventh is strange and May twenty-fifth is strange, and the anniversaries of D-Day are strange. It's strange, and perhaps somewhat offensive, to see Veterans' Day (Armistice Day, Remembrance Day) commercialized, though thankfully my college apartment's lack of television meant I didn't see any ads this year. It's never bothered me that Christmas is as commercialized as it is. This might just be my personal relationship (or not) with the religion around the modern holiday, but it makes sense that feast days be commercialized, if everything else will be. As long as there feast days, there will be someone willing to sell you the feast, or at least some trappings pertaining to it.
But Veterans' Day isn't a feast day. 9/11 isn't a feast day and really, neither is the Glorious 25th. 'Happy Veterans' Day' has the same jarring false note to it as 'Happy Twenty-Fifth of May' and while I imagine there are plenty of people likely to be offended at my inclusion of a fictional date with these others, that one's for my grandparents, though I suppose they all are, really. Grandpa was born the year of the Armistice, and the Great War wasn't his war, but the hope that this peace would lead to the end of wars, or at least the cessation of this one, and the Treaty that pretty directly lead to the one he shed blood and muscle for, looms in history to this day, 96 years on, one hundred years since this war began.
I admit my failings yet again. I don't know my history well enough. I don't have the authority to speak. But this day, and a few other days, I think of my grandparents, and this day, specifically, I think of others' grandparents. It's not a holiday in the sense we (Americans, but maybe not exclusively Americans) tend to think of the word, but it is a holy day. Blood was shed to get to this day, before it and after, and the First World War was not the war to end all wars. So maybe think of veterans today, alive or long since dead, and maybe spare some grief from our seemingly endless well for the millions who died in this war, maybe keep believing in that desperate, exhausted, horrified hope for peace.
(And I don't have an icon with a poppy. I have the September eleventh memorial, a signifier for grief and remembrance.)
