Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Armistice Day/Veterans Day

My grandmother, who is 93, used to refer to Vetarans Day as Armistice Day, its former name. Without any disrespect to our men and women of uniform- of which her late husband was one- I think it would be instructive to remember the origins of the holiday, which dates back to shortly after my grandmother was born. Here's something from the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, another member of that generation, that I would like to share:

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had 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 have talked to old men who were on 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 Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

Amen.