Take a minute every day and thank all our veterans
It’s Veterans Day, the day we honor the men and women who have served in the U.S. armed forces.
Veterans Day traces its roots to Nov. 11, 1918. At 11 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, Germany signed an armistice with the Allies in Compiègne, France, officially ending World War I. The following year, President Woodrow Wilson declared Nov. 11 a national holiday — Armistice Day — to honor those who had served in that war, which was optimistically referred to as “the war to end all wars.”
Congress changed Armistice Day to Veterans Day in 1954, and rededicated the day to honor all U.S. veterans.
Today, as our nation stands mired in its longest war ever, it’s fitting to recall President Wilson’s eloquent remarks from the White House 99 years ago today:
“A year ago today our enemies laid down their arms in accordance with an armistice which rendered them impotent to renew hostilities, and gave to the world an assured opportunity to reconstruct its shattered order and to work out in peace a new and juster set of international relations.
“The soldiers and people of the European Allies had fought and endured for more than four years to uphold the barrier of civilization against the aggressions of armed force. We ourselves had been in the conflict something more than a year and a half. With splendid forgetfulness of mere personal concerns, we remodeled our industries, concentrated our financial resources, increased our agricultural output, and assembled a great army, so that at the last our power was a decisive factor in the victory.
“We were able to bring the vast resources, material and moral, of a great and free people to the assistance of our associates in Europe who had suffered and sacrificed without limit in the cause for which we fought. Out of this victory there arose new possibilities of political freedom and economic concert. The war showed us the strength of great nations acting together for high purposes, and the victory of arms foretells the enduring conquests which can be made in peace when nations act justly and in furtherance of the common interests of men. To us in America the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service, and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of nations.”
Wilson’s oration and the nation’s justification for entering that war stand in stark contrast to today’s presidential tweets and yearslong conflicts.
What has not changed — and should never change — is our gratitude to those who have served in our military. Since we became a nation, less than 7.5 percent of the populace has worn the uniform. Today, about 0.4 percent of the American population is serving.
Yet our nation remains strong because of these dedicated men and woman who pledged to “... support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
For those pledges and sacrifices, we put aside our own concerns today and remember these selfless warriors.
Thank you to the men and women who make our country a safer and more prosperous society.