Armistice Day

Students of American History may remember: the eleventh hour of the eleventh day in the eleventh month. Armistice Day, commemorating the date and time the Armistice was signed at the end of World War I. The Great War, it was said, that would end all wars.

I don't recall when Armistice Day became Veterans' Day, but I insist on calling it by its original name. Not to slight any veterans who have died in subsequent wars, nor to slight the men and women who are currently dying in Afganistan and Iraq. But to comment on that notion that there could ever be a war to end all wars.

Only Armegeddon will end all wars — that is to say, the war that ends the world as we know it. Look, I don't know if it will be the four horsemen and all that Hal Lindsey/Tom LeHaye crap, or if it will be the great bomb we feared in the fifties. It might be a series of things, like dirty bombs and biological warfare. But humanity retains the tools and the capacity to destroy itself several times over.

Humanity seems strongly tied on the wheel of suffering and death we call war. There seems no escape. Let us never again fool ourselves into believing we can fight a war to end all wars, anymore than we can fight a war to end terrorism.

People have always had a choice how to respond to violence. Most of the time, we choose to respond with violence. The number of times we have chosen a non-violent alternative, or even diplomacy with the threat of violence (which is at least nominally better than actual violence), are extremely rare. The most natural thing in the animal kingdom is to respond to violence with violence. It takes an extreme act of will to respond any other way. I would suggest, however, that the non-violent (or diplomatic) response is the mature one — the response of an evolved being.

Let us take a few moments today, at eleven o'clock, to meditate on how we can be agents for true Armistice. Let us honor the fallen by becoming people who promote peace before guns. Let us sit in silence at 11 o'clock, as our grandparents once did, and pray for a lasting peace. Only in this way may we avoid the final Great War.