In uneasy time, Veterans Day Parade honors fallen in battle
On Sunday, as the 45th president continued his Twitter taunts of nuclear-armed nemesis Kim Jong Un of North Korea, veterans, peace activists and high school marching bands paraded down Fisherman’s Wharf — heralding the wounded and fallen, but feeling uneasy like few other times in history.
“I am very fearful that the combination of a narcissistic madman at the head of North Korea and a narcissistic madman at the head of the United States may accidentally bring us to not only World War III, but the end of the world as we know it,” said former San Francisco Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver. A civil rights Freedom Rider in the 1960s, Silver has a 40-year-old son
who served in the war in Afghanistan. Blissfully, she noted, he “came back all in one piece, for which I thank the forces of the universe.”
San Franciscans marked the Nov. 11 Veterans Day holiday on Sunday, the 100th anniversary year of the United States’ entry into World War I, before a crowd including a good number of tourists enjoying a sunny day by the bay. But stalwart onlookers included those committed to honoring veterans each year in a city legendary for its antiwar sentiment.
Dapper in pinstripes, retired Army Lt. Col. Wallace Levin — a veteran of the Korean War and event organizer of San Francisco’s Veterans Day Parade — celebrated the 1,000 marchers who represented “every race, color and creed” of the city.
“What veterans really want is peace,” he said Sunday, noting that President Trump’s rhetoric with North Korea is “not 100 percent wrong, it’s 1,000 percent wrong.”
Even when the president dials back his commentary — which in the past has threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” — Levin said Trump’s goading of the isolated, nucleararmed nation could eventually lead to countless zeroes added to the numbers of war dead and wounded.
If he had a word with Trump, Levin said his message would be simple: “If your sons and your daughters, your son-inlaw, and your youngest son were living in Seoul, would you be saying these things?”
Emerging Sunday morning on Twitter with renewed enthusiasm after a brief pause, Trump tweeted a distinctly personal message, shortly before leaving Hanoi for Manila at the close of his 12-day trip through five Asian countries: “Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me ‘old,’ when I would NEVER call him ‘short and fat?’ Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend — and maybe someday that will happen!”
At a news conference later, Trump added that “strange things happen in life,” and “it would be very, very nice” if he and Kim became friends.
Noting the odd twists in foreign affairs since the current administration took office, dozens of local members of the national organization Veterans for Peace gathered Sunday to assess the dizzying times the nation finds itself in. The group is focusing on beating back the privatization of veterans’ health care and highlighting the past 100 years — an end of “the war to end all wars,” which didn’t work out that way, said member Paul Cox.
“If we’re not in yet another war by this time next year,” the veteran noted somberly, “I’ll be surprised.”