It’s a sad commentary on our country when the owner of a spice company treats our military veterans, especially those who died in service, with more respect than the President of our country, the head of our military services, and the Republican legislators in our US Congress.

Veterans Day was originally Armistice Day, which recognized those who had served in World War I (then known as the Great War), particularly those who had died.  People were expected to pause and reflect at 11:00 on November 11, because the peace treaty for WWI had begun on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.  President Woodrow Wilson had this to say on the first Armistice Day in 1919:

A year ago today our enemies laid down their arms in accordance with an armistice which rendered them impotent to renew hostilities, and gave to the world an assured opportunity to reconstruct its shattered order and to work out in peace a new and more just set of international relations. The soldiers and people of the European Allies had fought and endured for more than four years to uphold the barrier of civilization against the aggressions of armed force. We ourselves had been in the conflict something more than a year and a half.

With splendid forgetfulness of mere personal concerns, we remodeled our industries, concentrated our financial resources, increased our agricultural output, and assembled a great army, so that at the last our power was a decisive factor in the victory. We were able to bring the vast resources, material and moral, of a great and free people to the assistance of our associates in Europe who had suffered and sacrificed without limit in the cause for which we fought.

Out of this victory there arose new possibilities of political freedom and economic concert. The war showed us the strength of great nations acting together for high purposes, and the victory of arms foretells the enduring conquests which can be made in peace when nations act justly and in furtherance of the common interests of men.

To us in America the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service, and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of nations.

Remember when we used to be the good guys in the world, standing with our allies to establish a state of stable peace, even when it required the last and worst option of engaging in a war?  One of the big news stories this Veterans Day is that the head of an American chip company was having an extramarital affair with a Chinese spy…and that President Trump knew about it but did nothing.  Another major story is President Trump’s rush to build a 250 foot “Trump Arch” outside Arlington National Cemetery, which many veterans groups oppose because it will distract from and literally overshadow the sacred gravestones of so many of our military heroes. And then there is the ongoing saga of the ego-driven man who wants to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War, and the Republican legislators who enable him.

Veterans deserve better treatment than that.  Those currently serving the the American military forces deserve better. All Americans do.

In contrast, I would like to share part of an email I got this morning from Bill, the owner of Penseys, a spice company.

Please stop today at 11AM and, if possible, pause whatever you are doing and spend a moment of silence thinking about the bottomless hurt that is war and the lifetime of burden we place on the lives of those we ask to wage it.

This pause at the start of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month used to be how, from generation to generation, we passed on the true costs of war and why it really, truly has to be held as the very last resort until every other option has been exhausted.

At some point we stopped stopping to remember. Now we find ourselves in a war of distraction that none of our leaders can even explain what winning this war would even look like. What a loss.

Please remember. Please thank the Veterans you know for their service. Please going forward do what you can to protect them from needless wars. The cost is too much.

And if you are near a store, please come get your free 11.11 Poppy Seeds of Remembrance trial bag. The bag cover features our WWII Veteran George Mullins at the 80th Anniversary of D-Day taking a knee at the grave of a friend who gave all liberating Europe. A Veteran saluting someone who gave for America.

We are just a Spice Company but we try. And today we are trying to get back to making the remembrance of the real cost of war an annual event. Please join us in this. Thanks. …

And Do Please Pause today at 11AM.

There was a time when on November 11 America, like Europe, celebrated Armistice and the ending of WWI and took a moment of silence to stop and remember those who paid the cost of the wars we wage.

Then Armistice Day became Veterans Day and where what once was about sharing the pain of those who serve became about waving the flag and cheering on those who serve. It’s a change that is in some ways small, but in other ways huge. Something America needed was lost in that transition.

And now America is at war again with horrible costs being paid on both sides and it’s like we don’t even know what that means anymore.

Our hope is there is something to these Seeds and the Poppy flowers that in Flanders fields grow between the crosses, row on row. Our hope is that if we can make this an annual event they might play a part in helping us get back something valuable we’ve lost. Time will tell.

I will admit, I had lost the tradition of pausing at 11:00 to say a prayer for those we have lost and to commit ourselves to a future of peace.  So I’m grateful to Bill of reminding me of that.  I’ve set my alarm and will be observing this spiritual tradition.

I hope you will join me in this.