Ninety years later, the hope that the Great War (World War I) would truly be the War to End All Wars has gone unfulfilled. The last of our Great War veterans has passed into eternity, but our wars continue.
And so we continue to remember our veterans, both living and dead, as a number of us gathered to do this Veterans Day morning at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City. A number of elected officials, including Cathedral City Councilmembers Chuck Vasquez and I, Desert Hot Springs Mayor Yvonne Parks, and Palm Springs Councilmember Lee Weigel -who has two family members at rest at the cemetery- were present, along with members of the Cathedral City Police and Fire Departments, a detail from the Palm Springs High School Air Force Junior ROTC, and -most importantly- a number of veterans from all of our armed services.
The audience was not as large as in years past, and some expressed disappointment at the turnout, but what we lost in numbers, we gained in a kind of intimacy.
Instead of being a crowd, we were a group of discrete individuals. It was possible to identify the World War II veterans, the Korea veterans, the Vietnam veterans, the Gulf War veterans, and veterans of the current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Moreover, in so relatively intimate a group as gathered this morning, one gains an enhanced sense of the meaning and importance of Veterans Day, for in the assemblage, not an individual could be found who was not a veteran, or a family member, friend, or co-worker of a veteran.
And in the end, that is, for me, a large part of what Veterans Day is about. I am the child, grandchild, and other relative of veterans. I am the neighbor of veterans, I am the co-worker of veterans. And those veterans are of every sort and condition. They descend from every tongue and nation; they are of every conceivable faith and confession; they are of every political persuasion; they are of every gender and sexual orientation; every one of them has defended our nation.
And as always, the challenge for our civil society is to make sure that those who have served are duly remembered for their service, that they are not forgotten when their service is done. In remembering our veterans, we must go beyond mere words to face a face a challenge no less important today than when President Abraham Lincoln identified it in his Second Inaugural Address: “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.”
In the intimate gathering this morning at Desert Memorial Park, Lincoln’s challenge to America gained a new measure of import as we continue to ask the men and women of our armed forces to be ready to go into harm’s way on our behalf.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, CA, where he serves as a member of the City Council. The views expressed herein are his own.
