I spent much of the morning before Veterans Day in various TV green rooms with a whole lot of vets, and also a young lady whose father died in Iraq in 2006. She is rightly proud of the dad she lost when she was barely old enough to know him, and he would certainly be very proud of the way his young daughter has turned out. But I wonder more and more whether our society is worthy of the terrible sacrifices of so very few. For Remembrance Day around the Commonwealth and Veterans Day in the United States, we present this piece from 16 years ago – the first November 11th after September 11th. I can’t precisely pinpoint the moment when “the day that everything changed” changed again and consigned the post-9/11 era to history, to the rear-view mirror of a fast receding past. But this is how it was in those first, vivid weeks of a new war:
For #RemembranceDay around the Commonwealth and #VeteransDay in the United States, we present this piece from 16 years ago – the first November 11th after September 11th: https://t.co/88anrpJCPH pic.twitter.com/9HwuUkII9x
— Mark Steyn (@MarkSteynOnline) November 11, 2017
On CNN the other day, Larry King asked Tony Blair what it was he had in his buttonhole. It was a poppy — not a real poppy, but a stylized, mass-produced thing of red paper and green plastic that, as the Prime Minister explained, is worn in Britain and other Commonwealth countries in the days before November 11th. They’re sold in the street by aged members of the Royal…