The Establishment™ Bar

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in the fourth year of war, the guns fell silent on the Western Front. The "war to end all wars" was noting of the sort. The interwar years were merely grist for a continuing conflict of utter barbarity.  But the hope remains that, one day, humanity will leave aside its violence, its propensity to settle disagreements with death. We cannot become the species we wish to become if we continue to kill each other. We cannot progress if we allow the quest for wealth and power to define us, either as individuals or as nations. War is not the health of the state, but its destruction. To a day when remembrances like these are a recollection of the violence we've left behind in the dusty past, rather than honoring those freshly killed for God and country.