Did you put a card in the mail on Nov. 11 to your favorite veteran? Vets Day cards? I didn't know there was such a thing. There is now. How about taking in a Veterans Day church service? You could have found such at First Lutheran or First Presbyterian. Schools were closed, but some high school bands presented patriotic concerts to honor our nation and its veterans.

It was once known as Armistice Day and commemorated the end of a tragic, senseless and, at the time, unpopular war that cost the lives of 20 million individuals. It had nothing to do with honoring the military and its veterans, since there was nothing honorable about intervening in foreign wars that made millionaires of defense contractors and Wall Street investors.

Britain's last World War I combat veteran, Harry Patch, died in 2009 at the age of 111. He boasted that he hadn't killed anyone in combat. "War isn't worth one life," Patch said; it is "calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings."

In his autobiography, "The Last Fighting Tommy," Patch wrote that "politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder." In the last years of his life, Patch warned some young naval recruits that they shouldn't join.

World War II Navy veteran John F. Kennedy once said: "War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector en­joys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today." He was also the only president who wanted to audit the Fed. No wonder he died young.

This Veterans Day overkill is doing all it can to glorify war and see that JFK's "distant day" never arrives.

Tags:& opinion, letters&