Veteran’s Day, once known as ‘Armistice Day’, has become nothing more than a recruitment advertisement for future veterans of America’s endless wars overseas. What once was a day to repeat “never again” and to make the public understand why, it has become a day to exalt the permanent invasions, occupations, and regime changes that our government now engages in. It needs warm bodies, so it begins promoting war at the earliest age possible, priming kids for “adventure”. I greatly appreciated having a sixth grade teacher who made it clear to us students that war isn’t adventurous. When you sign up with the military, you sell your soul to an institution that will tell you when, how, and whom to kill. And you may very well be killed in the process, or permanently maimed. Or you will see killing and maiming at such a personal level, get a front-row seat to the Grim Reaper’s work, watch young men go limp before your eyes, and you find yourself entering a nightmare that will never end. You will find that everything you’ve seen plays like a movie on repeat, and that’s all you see until you decide one day that you’ve had enough of the nightmare.
Veterans, with permanent wounds inflicted both on the inside and out, find that no support exists for them. They then find that they’ve developed inoperable cancer. They’re handed a cocktail of psychotropic drugs, but are restricted from using cannabis or psychedelics, two substances that have actually cured or mitigated their internal nightmare.
That’s why veterans kill themselves at twice the rate of other Americans, or set themselves on fire in front of VA hospitals, or “go crazy” and kill others. “He just snapped” say everyone around in the aftermath. That snapping happened long ago, on the other side of the world, in an unnecessary war allowed to be embarked upon by an indifferent public.
Let’s quit with this vulgar valorization of war. These veterans have suffered, and are now suffering, due to our indifference, to our careless disregard with what our government is doing abroad, what wars our government launches in our name. We engage in the most idiotic of rituals: the mindless Pledge of Allegiance, the hollow “thank you for your service”.
Neither Iraq, nor Syria, nor Afghanistan, was worth an American life nor an American dollar. Those wars accomplished nothing other than pain and death. When the vets come home from these war zones, we treat them the same that we treat them before they were shipped off: complete indifference. They get words, discounts at restaurants, special parking spots, and so much other ephemeral BS, as petty tokens, then we wash our hands of the entire situation. We give ourselves a solid pat on the back and move on.
We would better serve our veterans by paying attention to how our government creates them through reckless, endless war. It’s shameful to think of the way this entire nation whooped and cheered on the wars that created our current veteran class. The same philistines that cheered for more war are the same people who now clap for them in parades, thank them for their service, dutifully stand at attention for the Pledge, and thus ensuring that the system that creates these veterans will be that much harder to dismantle.
We would do some semblance of justice to our veterans, and make Veterans Day meaningful, by shielding future generations from suffering the same fate.
“When I was over here I never got to vote. I left my arm in my coat. My mom she died and never wrote. Now I’m home. And I’m blind. And I’m broke. What is next?”
