Remember, remember, the 5th of November

Here it is November already and the weather will soon be getting rude again. But all is not lost, Thanksgiving is only three weeks away. Besides Veterans Day this month, there’s Sadie Hawkins Day, Clean Your Refrigerator Day, Black Friday, the Great American Smokeout, Native Americans Heritage Day … and dang, I can’t believe I forgot about Guy Fawkes Day … again.

OK, I was busy with voting on my mind, but the day had significance anyway. As you know, Guy was the guy from whom we get the word guy, as in “that guy” or “you guys.” Guy’s place in history goes back to his role in the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt to blow up the House of Lords - along with the King - in London in 1605 on the 5th of November. Guy was very passionate about things, and I don’t know if he carried a copy of the Magna Carta around in his back pocket, but he felt King James was treating Catholics unfairly.

He was stopped in the nick of time and convicted of treason, but before he was drawn and quartered, he managed to wrest himself from the clutches of the hangman and fling himself off the gallows ladder, breaking his neck.

Over in England, the date is a national holiday with fireworks and Guy Fawkes masks, which you may have seen representing the internet activist group Anonymous and in the movie V For Vendetta.

As for today’s date, the Republican elephant was born on this day, Nov. 7, in 1874 when Harper’s Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast created a satirical drawing of an elephant about to fall into a hole. It referenced Republican President Grant’s possible bid for a third term, but the party ended up using it in its logos. The Democrat donkey dates back to an unflattering description of President Andrew Jackson, and that’s no surprise.

Frankly, neither was very flattering.

But enough of this political villainy and nonsense, let’s move on to something closer to home.

Next Tuesday, we observe Veterans Day with a ceremony at Isidro Baca Veterans Park. It gets underway on the 11th hour of the 11th day in the 11th month, commemorating the end of World War I when Germany agreed to an armistice with the allied nations on Nov 11, 1918.

One year after the war ended, Armistice Day was proclaimed, and by 1938 it was declared a federal holiday. After World War II and the Korean War, it was renamed Veterans Day and redefined to recognize all U.S. military veterans.

In school, I wasn’t taught too much about World War I other than the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the alliances between European countries, and the American Expeditionary Force’s involvement. And, oh yes, the influenza epidemic.

Although New Mexico had only been a state for two years before the war broke out in 1914, recruitment was brisk and young men lined up to sign up. So much so that by the end of WWI, New Mexico ranked fifth in the nation for military service, enlisting more than 17,000 recruits from all 33 counties. All but 501 returned home by war’s end.

I was reading that in New Mexico we currently have somewhere around 136,000 veterans, with a little over 1,100 in Socorro County, so I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone knows someone who has served, or maybe has served themselves or is serving right now.

I didn’t mean to wax too poetic about all this, but it makes no difference if their service was behind a desk, in a motor pool, a chow hall, a clinic, or carrying a rifle. This goes for all who have put on a uniform and seen duty at home in the National Guard or Reserves or far-flung places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Korea, Southeast Asia, and the European or Pacific Theaters in World War II. When you’re in a combat zone there are sights and sounds and smells you never knew before, and kind of it’s like the world has gone a little crazy.

Perhaps foretelling the creation of the VA and G.I. Bill of Rights, the big stick carrier, Army vet Teddy Roosevelt, once said, “A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to get a square deal afterward.”

Anyway, see if you can take a short break Monday morning and spend a few minutes remembering those who dedicated a little bit of their life to serving the rest of us. As the 1917 patriotic song goes, “Bless ‘em all, the long, the short and the tall … “

But, back to Thanksgiving and, if I may, the pressing question of the day: Do you have enough pumpkin spice to make it through the holidays?