Being as I spend most of my time looking at World War I memorials, I sometimes forget that Veterans Day, for most Americans, is the kind of federal holiday where you have to stop and think about why the library is closed and you aren’t getting any mail. There are still ceremonies if you know where to look for them (usually, at the town war memorials); there are often articles about veterans in the daily newspapers; Google has made a Doodle about it, but it does not command the public attention it once did. In the interwar years, Americans gathered yearly in long parades and large public gatherings to honor the dead of World War I. They did this even though Armistice Day was not made a federal holiday until 1938. In 1954, the holiday was renamed Veterans Day, to honor veterans of all wars.
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Abandoning the ‘War’ on COVID
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Sometime this month or next, the United States will hit a once-unimaginable milestone: one million dead from coronavirus. When that happens, the reaction from many will be muted. Americans are exhausted, most agree, and they are ready to put the pandemic behind them, whether or not the pandemic is done with them. We have hit so many milestones by now that these numbers appear almost meaningless to us. What makes one million more unimaginable than any of the rest of them?
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Much That Is Fair 