Veterans Day, also called Armistice Day (or Remembrance Day in the British Commonwealth), is today.
This day marks the eleventh hour of the eleventh day in the eleventh month, in the year of our LORD 1918, when the world celebrated the signing of an armistice that brought an end to a war which was supposed to have been “the war to end all wars” World War I.
I recall once reading a quote from an English historian named Charles A. Repington who wrote, with no shortage of acerbic wit: “We mutually agreed to call it ‘The First World War’ in order to prevent the millennium folk from forgetting that the history of the world was the history of war.”
As a passionate student of human history, as well as someone who seeks to understand from where our civilization has come and to where it is going, I cannot help but to stop and deeply reflect upon the significance of this day.
In many ways, World War I is a line of demarcation between two distinct eras of military history, but I believe there is also a divide culturally between that more agrarian-based Age and our current post-industrial civilization.
Because of the “Great War” new nations emerged and new national identities with them. Old empires and socio-political ideologies crumbled under the oppressive weight of utter irrelevance. Advances in technology burst forth, forcing the outmoded tactics of warfare to take on a new and even more horrifying form.
Give a man a grain of sand, and he will find a way to make it cause Cancer.
An old friend of mine (I’ll call him
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I was reading
There is an old German proverb which states, “Der Teufel steckt im Detail,” which translates as the English idiom: “the devil’s in the details.”
A friend of mine recently asked me to recommend a good book for his children that would, in his words: “make them love reading.”
Every single day the first thing my eldest son tells me when I come home from work is: “I missed you!”
A colleague of mine recently expressed sincere astonishment that we are now in the month of September. “It’s September?” she asked, almost doubting the calendar that was right before her eyes.
Traditionally it has been a day of feasting and celebration in this country. A time to celebrate all of those that labor, and permit them some respite from the vanity of toil.