Armistice Day or Veteran's Day?

[librechik]

This holiday was originally declared to celebrate the longed-for arrival of peace after WWI. The day the armistice was signed (the eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour) after so many years of slaughter, was certainly an event worth marking.

The name of the day was changed in the 50s (more or less concurrent with the addition of the phrase "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance) to Veteran's day, perhaps because there were so many still-living veterans of WWII who certainly deserved to be honored, and they demanded it, much as they demanded that the phrase "under God" be added to the Pledge of Allegiance. It was a Red Scare era, and our army and our flag and our God were lifeboats of security we clung to in the midst of a chaotic sea of possible enemies from within and without.

However, has this unfairly co-opted the original idea of honoring peace?

I'm not saying that vets shouldn't have a holiday; they obviously deserve one. But should we have abandoned the idea of honoring peace? I suspect that during the heat of the cold war it was thought more important to highlight the readiness of our warriors to do battle with the Soviets than it was to remember how horrible war is and that we should always first strive for peace rather than bloody victory. This is a 180 degree turnaround from the original sense of the holiday, IMO. Even as a child I wondered about the logic of this change (I remember it happening, vaguely.)

I've always wondered: Was there some cold-war politicking going on to erase the concept of Armistice and replace it with celebration of The Warrior? I miss the celebration of Peace, and I wish that holiday had not been erased from our calendar. Do others miss it? Nowadays if you wisah for peace you're painted as Saddam's handmaiden. What has gone wrong?