November 11 was Veterans Day, a federal holiday in which we remember those who have served in America’s armed forces. Originally, Veterans Day was called Armistice Day, as the day is also the anniversary of the armistice of the First World War. However, this was changed in 1954, and the name change was signed into law by President Eisenhower. This day may not be important for some, but this day always reminds me of a quote from the Kurt Vonnegut novel Breakfast of Champions:
“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.”
This day is a significant day in history, a day in which people that had been forcibly conscripted by unelected monarchs lay down their weapons and stopped fighting a war, the cause of which most high schoolers today don’t even know the cause of. The day is a remembrance of how we as humans forever have strived to one day be at a time when we can truly say that the end of a conflict will be the “War to End all Wars” that’s what we thought when The Armistice was signed and why so many soldiers and civilians alike celebrated the end of what had been the most nightmarish conflict the world had ever seen.
On the other hand, why on Earth did Clark not cancel classes? This day is a federal holiday, and most working people in this country take this day off. In addition, I am pretty sure everyone who goes to a liberal arts college in Massachusetts could use a three day weekend, given the “events” this country has had recently. The ice cream man coming to campus was great but that’s small potatoes compared to a day off especially given the magnitude of the situation affecting aspiring intellectuals at liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.