If you feel like it, I urge you to let us know that you, or a loved one, served our country, and any details you care to share, in the comments section of this post. We’d like to honor those who’ve served America, always and still the last great hope for man on earth.
It’s never felt right for me to say “Happy Veterans Day.” The ancestry of Veterans Day got its start in 1919 when Woodrow Wilson proclaimed November 11 Armistice Day, a day “to be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory.” The victory to which Wilson referred was the Allies’ victory, in retrospect largely pyrrhic, in World War I.
In 1938, Congress made Armistice Day a federal holiday, “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated as Armistice Day.” Unfortunately, dedication to the cause of world peace definitely did not bring it to fruition, as Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland the next year, initiating the least peaceful, by far, six years in world history.
In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower, having done probably as much as any human being to bring a successful end to the aforementioned carnage, signed into law legislation to swap “Armistice” for “Veterans” and thus honor those who fought in all of America’s wars.
“Grateful Veterans Day” makes more sense than “Happy Veterans Day.” And to all you Rounduppers who have served, and I know there are many of you, thank you.
If you feel like it, I urge you to let us know that you, or a loved one, served our country, and any details you care to share, in the comments section of this post. We’d like to honor those who’ve served America, always and still the last great hope for man on earth.
Grateful Veterans Day!
______________
Finally, here’s the piece I wrote on Memorial Day 2021. Yes, I know that Veterans Day and Memorial Day are different holidays, but I think the sentiment of the piece has gained relevance in light of the events that have transpired in Afghanistan and elsewhere since May.
Pondering a Thousand Years of Darkness
May 31, 2021
There’s something about Memorial Day that makes me think of Ronald Reagan’s line, delivered in 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated presidential campaign:
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.
Reagan didn’t say those words on Memorial Day, but they have long been connected with the holiday in my mind. I think it’s probably because Reagan was talking about service and sacrifice for America - the last best hope - and Memorial Day honors those who have sacrificed the most.
One of the most memorable things I got to do when I was mayor of Bend, some 10 years ago now, was to speak at a Memorial Day event held at a memorial to war dead in a cemetery in town. There were veterans and lots of people - even an F-15 flyover. I wasn’t the headliner (Senator Ron Wyden spoke after me), and I had about five minutes to say whatever I wanted.
I used that time to talk, in part, about Reagan’s quote, the unique role of America in the course of human history, and the value of the ultimate sacrifice of those who’ve died in service to our country. I argued that America remained something - an idea, really - too precious and too rare in human history to let slip away.
Each Memorial Day since, I’ve thought about that Reagan quote. What is unique about America in the course of human history, why it’s the indispensable nation standing between humanity and darkness, is that it is a country created for the purpose of preserving the liberty of its people. That it did so and still does so imperfectly and with glaring and shameful omissions regarding who qualifies as people deserving of liberty dims but does not snuff out the supernova that America’s founding and its enduring existence has been for the world. Following millennia consisting almost exclusively of brutality and subjugation of the governed at the hand of those who govern, the idea of America was revolutionary. It still is.
As remarkable as the founding was the fact that the reward for the sacrifice of those Americans we honor today has been so widely shared throughout humanity. Nations that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, Germany and Japan, were, post-vanquishing, not turned into colonies but instead left to embark on liberal self-governance for the first time in their histories. The one-time subjects of our enemies, western Europeans, South Koreans and notably the Chinese, were saved from continued subjugation and, also, left to self-governance. The graves of American young men litter the Earth in places that our country liberated and left free. This, like America’s very existence, is an historical anomaly of the best kind.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about one part of that Reagan quote more than any other: the part about sentencing our children to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. NB: I’m a blast to hang out with. I suppose I think about that more now that I have kids.
I don’t think I’m alone in harboring this gnawing feeling that America is on a precipice, that one more wrong step or two or three and we will plunge toward those thousand years of darkness, dragging the rest of the world with us. Sometimes it feels like we are already plunging.
It’s not an election result, or even a series of election results, that give me that feeling. It’s the fact that Americans are ignorant of, or forget about, the gift we’ve been given, to live here, now. I include myself in that critique. There’s something about the good life - and Americans today have it better by almost any available measure than any human beings have ever had it - that makes a person feel entitled. It can lead a person, say, this person, to grumble about business closures that don’t work and self-defeating economic policies and other things that are relatively picayune, compared to the big picture. And the big picture is that what we have, what we’ve been given, isn’t just special or rare; it’s unique.
When Americans are once again called upon to protect it, or to protect those who stand with it, will we answer the call? China, one of those nations we helped to save from Axis domination, is ascendant, expansionary and genocidal. Twentieth Century history demonstrates this is a dangerous combination. A confrontation, military or otherwise, seems inevitable. Maybe it’s not China but it will, someday, be some country that threatens the American idea. The period since World War II without major power wars is an historical aberration. It will not last forever.
America retains the wealth and technology to engage in a major power war and win it, but does it have the will? Is a country putatively rotten to the core with systemic racism and all manner of inequity worth fighting and dying for? Can a country that’s still arguing about who won the last presidential election summon the collective energy to stand up to bad guys? Do we even know bad guys when we see them anymore?
These are questions to which we can’t and won’t know the answer until a conflict or a potential conflict arises. When China attacks Taiwan. When Belarus, with Russian support, highjacks an American airliner, filled with Americans. When an Iranian missile strikes a U.S. warship. How far can our enemies push, how much can they damage our allies until America responds with force is very much an open question today.
In the past, the U.S. has used military force at times wisely and at times unwisely. But the historical net effect of American military might has been to stand between humanity and a thousand years of darkness. Our war dead, in their rendezvous with destiny, paid the highest sacrifice. Americans will be called upon once again to do the same. Our response will depend upon whether we still believe, whether we still know, we are the last best hope for man on Earth.
Col. Charles F. Austin, my Father rose from an inductee during World War II through officers candidate school to career army officer. He served with distinction as did all of my Uncles. We can never thank them or honor them Enough. Kathy Austin
Bob Weidner: 1954-1980. He enlisted in the reserves while in high school and then US Army Infantry, Wisconsin National Guard and finishing with Oregon Army National Guard 162nd Infantry Brigade; he did not see combat himself, although he was twice on a plane to the Cuban Missile Crisis and they were turned back both times. I had the privilege of taking him on the Honor Flight to Washington DC in May, 2017. The greatest generation!