Saturday, November 11, 2006

Veteran’s Day

Today was Veteran’s Day, the day when we are supposed to honor the soldiers who have fought and killed and died to protect this nation and its interests around the world.  Allow me to share two stories with you as I remember what veterans have done for this country.

When I was an undergraduate, I took a class titled Fascism and Nazism.  I wanted to learn how it was the world had gone insane for so long, and how we could learn from history so we would never allow it to happen again.  I learned a great many things that scared me then and scare me now, but that’s not the point.  The point is that the class took a field trip from State College PA to Washington DC to visit the Holocaust Museum.  It was horrific.  There was an empty space where thousands of shoes were supposed to be - the shoes of Jewish people who’d gone to their deaths in the camps had been pulled because they were disintegrating and needed to be better preserved - and yet the emptiness was nearly as impressive as a mound of thousands of shoes would have been.  I walked through a railcar that Jews had been sent to camps in and was appalled.  I wept in the museum listening to the stories of survivors talking about those who had not survived.

As someone who is not Jewish, I thank all the veterans who fought against the Fascists and Nazis.

The second story comes from when I was in high school.  I was involved in the Close Up program, a private program that introduced students to government.  In my case, we got to study international relations, we roleplayed a model UN, and we visited all the usual sights around D.C.  Including, one cold afternoon, the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial.  I was amazed and humbled by the memorial, and I watched grown men, some supported by their families, some alone, break down as they hunted for the names of men they knew on those slabs of black granite.  Unfortunately, some of the students I was with could only think of the cold and how the granite was warm.  Their quest for warmth by leaning back up against the slabs seemed to me to be egregiously disrespectful, not only of the dead, but more importantly, of the men who were there remembering friends and family lost in a largely pointless war.  It strikes me still that the biting cold of that day was fitting for the occasion.

As someone who was not even born during Vietnam, every time I think of the soldiers in Iraq and how we can support them while still opposing the invasion, I remember the cold young girls who somehow missed the significance of what they were doing.  And I remember to support my cousin and all the veterans who have fought, killed, and died for me and my country, even in wars I disagree with.

May the gods protect you all.