Refusing Consent on Veterans Day

Thursday was Veterans Day, and although it’s customary for my daughter’s Girl Scout troop to join the parade, this year she didn’t march.

In the past, I’ve been proud of my daughter’s participation in this parade. As a Quaker, I have a problematic relationship with war, and as a student of popular culture, I have an awareness of how parades operate within their cultural context. Parades, like monuments honor people in a certain grandiose way. They invite adulation and deference. Parades in the honor of anyone—veterans, baseball players, or astronauts—are organized spectacles of hero worship.

Not that I object to honoring veterans. I have great respect for the sacrifice made by men—and now women—who leave everything they know and love at a very young age and risk their lives for what they believe. Some of them lived through hell, and many have never been the same. Sacrifice and risk in defense of deeply held beliefs should be honored. No question.

The problem is that this year, The Wife and I felt very different about the parade. My daughter was indifferent—she didn’t like the idea of walking two miles, but she wanted be with her Girl Scout friends, and do what they were doing. She left the decision to us.

The Wife and I started talking about what it means to march in a parade. If you march in a parade, your act of marching actually endorses the object of the parade whether you want it to or not.

And that’s the problem. This year, we felt strongly that the parade was not just about veterans. Things like Veterans Day parades have lately taken on the feel of a pro-war rally. The slim majority that re-elected Bush, who sing along with Toby Keith, and who accuse us of treason for questioning the war insist that all “real” Americans support the troops by supporting the war. It’s gotten to the point where even waving a flag at a Veterans Day parade is seen as an endorsement of a war that I believe to be cruel and unjust. And that’s a problem for a Quaker family.

We found ourselves in a frustrating dilemma. We had a desire to march without giving consent, to somehow honor the veterans but not the war. There was a voice inside my head saying “You Liberals—why do you have to ruin something as wholesome as Girl Scouts marching in a Veterans Day Parade with your protesting and complaining?” But I didn’t buy that argument. Conservatives accuse Liberals of “ruining things for everybody” when Liberals speak up against the injustice and oppression of everyday life. And we’re not “bringing politics into it,” the politics are already there. It’s the politics of the status quo. If the status quo benefits you and people like you, then it’s easy to accuse those who speak against it of spoiling everybody’s fun. And if the status quo is repugnant to your moral principles, then failing to speak against it is an act of cowardice, an endorsement of the politics of the status quo.

We wished that there were some way to honor the veterans while refusing to honor the war, but an event like a Veterans Day parade is so charged with gung-ho jingoism that we felt any gesture of protest would been seen as an insult to the veterans themselves. We felt strongly that the last thing we wanted to do was to make veterans feel insulted at their own parade. We wished that our daughter’s Girl Scout troop were made up entirely of Quakers. We thought that maybe the critical mass of 7 or 8 little girls could carry a banner that incorporated peace signs somehow, or maybe a slogan like “Quaker Girl Scout troop 1131 Prays for Peace.” Something clear but non-threatening, something hard to misconstrue as an insult to the veterans. Something that withheld consent without giving offence.

But we don’t have a troop of Quaker girls, so our daughter didn’t march this year. I regretted the decision, but I regretted more the dilemma forced on us. Why do we have to be inoffensive? Why do the Conservatives get to turn Veterans Day into “Pro-War Day,” and then make me feel like I have to tiptoe around it?

For that matter, how many people out there waving flags on Thursday knew the history of Veterans day? That it was originally Armistice day, a day to celebrate the end of the most horrific war the world had known to that point. A day to pray that the “war to end all wars” had actually done just that. A day to pray for peace, that got turned into a day to honor veterans, and then turned into a day to endorse the war.

And that’s what I really felt angry about. That there was just one more thing that the Conservatives had taken away from the rest of us. Like the Bible, like Family, like strong moral positions and the love of our country. Like a flag on your car after 9/11: for a while it meant solidarity with the rest of America—a sudden, deep re-appreciation of patriotism that millions of us felt after that terrible day. But then we were dropping bombs on Afghanistan, and a flag on your car meant your consent, your endorsement of something else entirely.

The foundational success of the Republican strategists, the talk show hosts, and the White House spin doctors has been their ability to appropriate certain symbols, themes, and values for the Republican party. The flag and the Bible are the most galling, but the Veterans Day parade is the one that hit home this week. Until my Quaker, anti-war daughter can march in a parade and wave a flag in honor of veterans without becoming a de facto shill for Donald Rumsfeld, then we on the left have failed to reclaim our cultural birthright from those who say that the only “real” Americans are those who agree with them.