I’m still listening, Kurt. Still moved. (Photo from Wikipedia.)

When I write about something I’ve learned from the Baha’i system of knowledge and practice – or rather, in trying to understand it better – it sometimes appears at the Baha’i Teachings website. I also go there for small doses of perspective, wisdom and hope, and find them. David Langness is one of my favourite writers at BT, not least because on what Canucks call Remembrance Day, he posted a piece called “Veterans’ Day: Let’s Call It Armistice Day Again”. Although short, it was weighty, since Langness is himself a veteran of what the Vietnamese people don’t call the Vietnam War. Yes, and he also led off with a passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut is a hero to me.

I just re-read KV’s preface to that famous American novel. My vision blurred and I commenced breathing like a beat-up old machine. (This often happens when I read Vonnegut. He murders me, when I’m apparently supposed to laughing like a loon at his satire. ) He calls Breakfast a 50^th-birthday present to himself, a mid-life attempt “to clear my head of all the junk in there….I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet….I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and non-white Americans who imitate white Americans, should do…” (Sheesh. 1973!)

David Langness, in his argument for re-naming Veterans’ Day, goes on to cite his reasons: the growth of jingoism, hero-worship and militarism associated with November 11 in his country. “Perversely, we’ve turned the day into a recruiting tool for further war instead of a celebration of peace.” It’s well worth a read. But thanks to Mr. Langness, I’m pleasantly obsessing today over the incredible Kurt Vonnegut (how I miss him!) and these closing words of his preface to Breakfast of Champions. He explains why Armistice Day – from the Latin for “a cessation of arms” – is a holy concept that he will hang on to:

“So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.

“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy … 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. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

“Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

“So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

“What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

“And all music is.”