Seven years ago today, i arrived in Paris on my first trip out of the country. i caught up on sleep after a difficult flight, then we went to Notre Dame, a few blocks from our hostel. i had always ignored Veterans' Day in the US as another inconvenient day when banks and the post office were closed, and i didn't really get the significance of Remembrance Day in Europe. To my surprise, the cathedral was packed with more ceremony attendees than tourists, and the speaker was clearly American. When we jostled our way to a place from which we could see the front of the church, there were religious leaders from each of the Allied countries giving a joint sermon in honor of the fallen and the alliances between the nations that had endured, despite a severe test twenty-five years later. i still have the paper poppy a French woman gave me outside the cathedral.
In 1999, security was a simpler thing. My mom sat in the gate with us before we boarded our plane, even though she wasn't going with us. No one my age had any concept of a senseless war with senseless deaths, fought for shaky reasons and with a non-resolution that only led to more conflict. Seven years later, we cannot say the same. While the lists of the dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Israel, Lebanon, and every other place touched by the war on terror do not compare with the deaths of millions eighty years ago, they are no less horrific and no less excusable. On this day, don't think of the sacrifices of long-dead adolescents in Europe for a cause that was irrelevant. Think of the sacrifices of the people whose bodies and minds cannot be reassembled from the fruitless violence of our current war.