Veteran's Day

It's good to stop on Veteran's Day and remember that everything we have, we have because of war, because brave men fought in savage conflicts to protect and enlarge our patrimony. Often, when I'm feeling that my life is just too too difficult, I think about an Iraqi man I read about, who spent 17 years in a little crawl-space between two walls in his family's home, to avoid arrest by Saddam's secret police. War freed him, and war keeps us from suffering a similar fate, or far worse...

Remember, as you enjoy your holiday (or, like Charlene and I, you enjoy the huge privilege of being self-employed, and working hard today because the work is there) that you are not worrying about visits by secret police because a lot of good guys killed a lot of bad guys over the course of many centuries...

David Furst / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images
Soldiers from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division gather together to pray moments before setting off on a patrol of western Baghdad on Thursday. Army Times 11/8/05





American soldiers at a funeral near Saint-Mihiel, 1917



[link]

You all know how it's often a problem, when children are raised in prosperity, that they sometimes have no appreciation of how hard their parents worked, and how hard life can be.

And our nation has a similar problem. Our ancestors performed miracles of endurance and suffering and courage, so we could enjoy wealth and comfort such as the world has never seen. But this very success has created a sub-culture of Eloi, weak and foolish creatures who burble, "War never solved anything," when it has in fact solved a host of their problems. They are sitting in unthinking comfort and security on the heaped bones of America's enemies.

And while smugly enjoying the spoils of war, some of the Eloi have embraced the twisted idea that war is evil and therefore other people should suffer. They will lick the grease of the Christmas goose off their fingers while doing their moral duty in helping to keep Koreans starving (burp!), and Iraqis shredded, and Sudanese enslaved, and the Afghans under the heel of the Taliban....

The quote I keep on my sidebar fits this day pretty well...

"I disputed the premise, "Blessed are the peacemakers."
On the contrary, it was always those who fought evil
whom history remembered as the greatest in their generations."
      -- Rabbi Shmuley Boteach