On the Eleventh hour

One hundred and one years ago today; "on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the war to end all wars ended."

This to me has always been a powerful sentence. It is history for all the right and wrong reasons. This nation has almost always been shrouded on a war footing. In the long-ago days of my youth I learned the reasons for most of them. Obviously the American Revolution that began this country was to overthrow rule from a land far away. Even then this country was becoming a melting pot and we were no longer 'English'. The next was 1812, often noted as the second war of independence. Along the way were various other skirmishes, not including the Civil War. That was a dark time all of itself.

And then the War to End all Wars. It was the first global conflagration, a scale almost unheard of on a historic level. Due to our involvement America was thrust onto the world stage teetering on the brink of becoming a world power. From there the country slid back into partial obscurity. Even though our military might turned the tide in WWI, this country was not part of the prevailing power structure.

But then the unthinkable happened. World War II almost made WWI look like a skirmish. With the advancement of technology, death was delivered on an unprecedented scale to both military and civilian populations.

So, what's the point of this ramble on Veteran's Day you ask? Perhaps it is my age, perhaps it is how my views have changed on the world and how I view the leaders of this nation. There was a time when I believed there was an underlying moral purpose to these conflicts and that this nation did what it needed to do. Perhaps it is simply naivete. But now in this day and age I no longer believe we hold the moral compass for engagement in a war. They have now come about due to political expediency and the whims of our national leaders. How else do you explain the protracted military presence in the middle eastern countries? Any visceral reaction due to 9/11 is to be expected, however our stay in that part of the world should have ended long ago.

It's time we thank all those who have served and served bravely in defense of this nation and the best way to do that is to pull them back to home shores. It's time we let our economic might as a nation defend our world policy and stop needlessly putting young men and women in harm's way. Our military might should be used when this nation is directly threatened and no longer be used as an instrument to police a world half a globe away.