Happy Armistice Day

Today is Armistice Day, i.e. Veterans' Day, which is really not the same thing. An Armistice is when both sides agree to stop fighting, and today is the 80th Anniversary of the occasion that we are commemorating, when the Allies and the Axis powers signed the armistice on the eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour. So the word "armistice" says to me the avoidance of conflict. It's not exactly peace, but what is, exactly, peace? Isn't true Peace the lions lying down with the lambs and the Republicans hanging with the Dems and the Ohio State fans tailgating with, I dunno, Michigan? And how likely is that? I mean, isn't it a heck of a lot more likely that the lions and lambs will get along than those other scenarios?

The word "peace" implies brotherly love. People are at peace when there is nothing to fight about anymore, and that implies awareness, and growth, and we are quite simply not there. We can say, "There is nothing worth going to war about," but that would be us, who are rich, and have everything we want appear at the click of the mouse, like genies from the bottle. Sure, maybe money can't buy happiness, but abject poverty can't buy happiness either. So it's very easy to say "Peace out, dude!" but where there is suffering, there will be war.

So I want to go back to this word, Armistice, and suggest we think about its meaning and really celebrate it today. An armistice is never a final solution. The word armistice implies arms, and where there are arms, there will be conflict. At best, an armistice is a band-aid. But what I want to say is, there's nothing wrong with band-aids, and they are certainly better than the alternative, which is bleeding all over the place and making a mess.

We are never going to solve the problems in the Middle East, or anywhere else in the world. Maybe we can help a little, but who really knows. There is so much deep-seated cultural stuff that we just can't understand, or change, and that's fine, because that's their culture. We have our culture, they have theirs.

I am personally opposed to sending American kids to get shot at, for any reason, anywhere in the world, and yes, I do have a special predilection for American lives. It's like saying to a parent, "Oh, you care more about your own kid than the neighbor's." Of course, the parent is more interested in the safety of his own child than other children. It's only natural.

So today, we have changed the name to Veterans' Day, and rather than celebrating even a delicate, uneasy kind of half-assed peace, which is the armistice, we are celebrating people who have gone to war, many of whom never came back. And those people totally deserve to be celebrated, and applauded, because they really did give all, but I would just like to see them celebrated on another day, because today is the day to pray for armistice.

Because even a half-assed kind of peace is better than none at all.