You know you’re old when you get annoyed by minor mistakes that aren’t really that big a deal.
Thursday is Veterans Day, one of two holidays in which we honor the men and women who have served our country in the military, both in times of war and peace. It’s a holiday whose date commemorates the end of World War I and for many years was known as Armistice Day.
It’s one of the only secular American holidays also celebrated in other countries, and in the early 1970s, when the federal government changed some of the holiday to Mondays to create three-day weekends, it’s the only one people made enough of a fuss about to change it back.
For a few years it was celebrated as the fourth Monday in October, but 11-11 was the date that mattered to those who fought in what they thought was the War to End War.
That’s not the part that annoys me, though. If you look at the cartoon above, all you see are headstones.
Dead soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.
But we already had a holiday to honor those who gave, as Abraham Lincoln once said, the last full measure of devotion.
It’s called Memorial Day. It used to be known as Decoration Day, when descendants would go to cemeteries and leave flowers at the graves of those who served and died. For many years in was celebrated on May 30th until the government changed it to the last Monday in May.
Nobody made much of a fuss.
So Memorial Day was for those who died in the service of their country and Veterans Day was for those who served, survived and then died later of non-military causes.
My grandfather served in World War I and died in 1985. My dad served in WWII and died in 2008 and my uncle — my mother’s brother — served in WWII and died in 2010.
We don’t honor them on Memorial Day.
Veterans Day is their holiday.
So why is a 71-year-old geezer who never served making a fuss about what sounds an awful lot like nit-picking?
I could say it’s because he can, but there’s more to it than that.
We don’t need two different holidays that celebrate exactly the same thing.