“I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return…
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.”

-W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939,” written upon the occasion of the invasion of Poland.

Photo | Wes Cheney Photography, Inc.

When a gusting Nor’easter blew out the 25 candles laid out on Veterans Day to commemorate the 25 Virginians killed (in uniform) in Afghanistan, few were there to notice. Never have so many cared so little for the sacrifice of so few.

Clad from head to toe in Gore-Tex®, I had ridden my be-fendered bike, “Inclementine,” through a piercing downpour to Town Point Park in downtown Norfolk to see the Eyes Wide Open exhibit–a display of 200 pairs of combat boots honoring U.S. military casualties of war. Because of the rain, though, the boots had been moved to the covered entrance to Nauticus. As I arrived a handful of earnest volunteers were scurrying to pack the boots into plastic bins before city workers closed the floodgates, stranding them on the wet side of the flood-wall.

The few visitors had come instead to see the lifeboat on which Norfolk-native Captain Richard Phillips was held hostage for five days off the coast of Somalia (before his captors were shot dead with gyroscopic-stabilized, night-vision sniper rifles), and the National Geographic-sponsored Real Pirates exhibit at Nauticus. Most were not expecting to see hundreds of boots and shoes lined up in formation, name tags fluttering in the wind.

In this, our age of robotic bombers and 24-hour news, the deaths of soldiers, civilians and contractors has become as meaningless to most of us as the body count in our video games. We have become enamored with the tools of war, but disconnected from the its effects. Our wars are outsourced to professional soldiers and profit-making contractors, unmanned aerial vehicles and cruise missiles. In the words of Roger Waters, America fights “with the bravery of being out of range.”

As the gusting wind carried away the water that sprayed from my bicycle tires, I heard in my mind my grandmother clearly enunciating, “Armistice Day,” a title supplanted by the more generic “Veterans Day.” I contemplated how my inconvenience of riding a few miles through the rain was fleeting compared to the horrors experienced by our forebears in the trenches of the war for which Armistice Day was founded: The War To End All Wars, The Great War, the war later known as the First World War.

My grandmother’s generation, Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation,” were the children of the Lost Generation; a generation of brothers, cousins and uncles lost in the trenches of France and Belgium, and lost in spirit upon return home. We belittle the term “slaughter” when using it to describe the 14 deaths at Fort Hood. For months generals sent waves of men into the Battle of the Somme, at a cost of at least 1.5 million casualties.

Those who returned home from The Great War did not always return home whole. My grandmother was born Cora Elsie Dame, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant in Italian- and Irish-Catholic East Boston. The doughboys who survived the Somme were my grandmother’s cousins and uncles, often shell-shocked, the dockhands and drayers who drank away their pain and paychecks at the corner bar with her father, my great-grandfather.

“Armistice Day,” my grandmother would say, “That, Wesley, is the original name for today, Veterans Day. That is what we called it when I was your age.”

The term “armistice” seems antiquated to us now. Now, we speak of “treaties,” “ceasefires,” and the “suspension of hostilities.” The American intervention broke the exhausted stalemate of the Western Front, and the generals agreed to stop shooting at “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” in 1918.

Today, when each and every American corpse is guarded until whisked away from the battlefield on an “Angel Flight”, it is hard to comprehend that in The Great War the number of recovered dead was nearly matched by the number of missing: 10 million soldiers were killed, 8 million missing in action, and another 20 million wounded. In addition, almost 7 million civilians were killed, and probably twice as many wounded.

The sacrifice, both for gain and for naught, was not intended to be forgotten. In 1926, Congress declared,

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations… (emphasis added)

In 1938, Congress went further, declaring Armistice Day to be a national, legal holiday, “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day’.” (emphasis added)

In 1954, Armistice Day was renamed Veterans Day, a day to,

solemnly remember the sacrifice of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us re-consecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain. (emphasis added)

Crowds celebrating Armistice Day in Chicago, 1927. Photo | Library of Congress

Today fleeting few remember the original commission of Armistice and Veterans Day, and the idea of a “world peace day” seems as antiquated and innocent as the League of Nations. Now we “honor all who served,” with platitudes and ceremonies, but too rarely with actions and sacrifices.

Eyes Wide Open was brought to Norfolk by the Virginia Beach Friends Meeting (better known as Quakers,) Norfolk OffBase, and the American Friends Service Committee, whose efforts to feed the starving German people in the aftermath of each world war earned them a Nobel Peace Prize.

As part of their Christian, pacifist tradition, Quakers ask themselves, “Do we endeavor to live in the life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars? Do we we do our part in the work of reconciliation between individuals, groups, and nations?” It is a query to which there is no easy answer. In the age of the War on Terrorism, Quakers struggle to find a relevant, contextual answer. A truthful, if not factual, Quaker parable sums up the responsibility and context incumbent upon each person to bring peace to the world: Sir William Penn–the founder of Pennsylvania, and who was obligated as a gentleman to wear a sword in the king’s court–asked the founder of Quakerism, George Fox, if it was acceptable for a pacifist to carry a sword. George Fox is said to have replied, “Wear it as long as you can.” He gave no easy answer; no Talmudic prohibition against carrying arms on the Sabbath, nor an accommodating separation of church from state and beliefs from actions, but rather a zen-like koan to be answered by the individual: “Wear [the sword] as long as you can.”

On Veterans Day, the day formerly known as Armistice Day, we should all pause to remember those who gave the ultimate sacrifice. Each succeeding generation has sought to leave a better world for the next. Those who witnessed the carnage of true world wars committed themselves through acts of legislation to the cause of an enduring, global peace. But now we honor the warrior with little more than a lapel pin, forgetting the cause fought for, just as we glorify the tools of war, but ignore the products of war.

As I rode up Granby Street, into the face of a Nor’easter, the wind blew so fiercely that I found myself leaning into it to keep atop my bike, rain stinging my face. I thought of the wars we have fought, both directly and by proxy, to control the oil that fuels our consumer, car culture. Our secret agents have deposed popularly elected governments for the sake of oil, as in Iran, and we spend billions every year for our warships to guard the Straits of Hormuz for supertankers. We turn a blind eye to the corruption and destruction fueled by bribery and Western money in the far-away lands of Nigeria and Angola. Dollars and Euros flow into the bank accounts of oil-rich fundamentalists who have no compulsion about maintaining the status quo through the barrel of a gun. Are these the actions that will sustain an enduring, world peace, and honor the millions who have died in one too many world wars?

I choose, then, to pedal peace. I choose to transport myself by bicycle whenever expedient and practical. It is a small choice, no doubt, insignificant in stratagems of global security. But it is a start. It is a simple way for one person live a life that takes away an occasion for war.

Read this and other essays by Wes Cheney on his blog, http://fotobywes.blogspot.com.