ON THE ELEVENTH HOUR...

This is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, about today, which is now called Veteran's Day but was once called Armistice Day.

"All the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God."

How amazing. I first read Breakfast of Champions in a long ago world called the 1980s. And that passage hit me like a ton of bricks. The idea of all that carnage coming to an end, leaving people on the battlefield standing in silence, surrounded by the awfulness of that war. The idea of how hope can sometimes break through, after terrible times of sadness and terror, after living in the worst of times, after coming to believe that maybe all hope is indeed lost, if it ever was anything more than an illusion to begin with. 

The idea of saying enough of this. Enough of killing each other over what patch of land flies a particular flag. Enough of division and anger and finding a way to accept the unacceptable as the way things are. 

Enough.

We made it to this day, through almost a year of Covid, through a nasty election, through economic uncertainty, through fear and suspicion and hatred and loss. 

We made it.

The sudden silence has come, and behind it, music. And with music, dancing. And with dancing, joy. 

I know my conservative friends and sad. I know my liberal friends are happy. I know we have more of the pandemic to endure. And more sorrow coming, as that is part of the deal.

But I also know we have all gotten through a hell of a year.

Yes, I know, we still have almost two months to go. 

Still. We crossed the valley. Some of us got the scars to prove it. Some of us didn't make it. Some of us will need a long time to heal.

But we made it. We, the collective we, the human race.

We made it.

Time to try and take what we've gone through and make ourselves better human beings. 

And to love.

Here's a song. It's "Are We Alright Again" by Eels.