Reason with a View

  At 2:11 this afternoon, the whole country is asked to stop for two minutes — a nationwide moment of silence, set in law, for everyone who has served in the uniform of the United States. This post is simply that. Two minutes, the flag, and silence. Press play, and keep it with us. This morning we told the story of how this day came to be — the eleventh hour, and the shoe repairman who widened it to hold every veteran: The Eleventh Hour: A Short History of Veterans Day .

At 11:00 in the morning on November 11, 1918, the guns stopped. It wasn't a surrender, exactly — it was an armistice, a cease-fire signed in a railway carriage in a French forest — but after four years of the worst war the world had ever seen, the Western Front went quiet at a set hour: the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Men who had been trying to kill each other at 10:59 put their rifles down at 11:00. That hour is where this holiday lives, and it has never really left it. A year later, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed November 11 as Armistice Day. Congress added its own resolution in 1926, and in 1938 the day became a legal federal holiday, in the words of the act, "dedicated to the cause of world peace." There is something worth sitting with in that phrase. The men who made it a holiday weren't just honoring a war. They were hoping — they'd seen enough — that there wouldn't need to be another one. There was another one. An...