You'll go to work if you have to. You'll grocery shop, maybe. You'll make love or eat soup or have a drink in the evening.

And it will be Veterans Day, which was once Armistice Day, and which commemorates the end of World War I, a multinational conflict over nearly nothing that is now so safely over that most people barely observe the day. Government employees get the day off because they are the aristocrats of the working and middle class. About 20% of the rest of the workforce gets the day off or gets the overtime for working.

Sparsely attended parades can be found in a large number of cities and towns, and a local band of reenactors dress as Revolutionary War soldiers and march. They stop along the parade route to fire their muskets in the air. The sound of gunfire delights children and scares dogs. The rest of us, veterans of America's war at home, scan the rooftops for a deranged sniper with a "manifesto" in his pocket and a high-capacity rifle that would have ended World War I in a couple of days if either side had the damn thing.

The first World War ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month because our ancestors had a gift for high-flown symbolism, and because this was the "war to end war," and it deserved a glorious and hopeful end. No one knows if the politicians and the newspaper people believed that slogan, but the ordinary people whose daddy never came home from Chickamauga probably didn't.

And, as the muskets "bang" in the parade, the missiles will arc in over Gaza, being fired by one side or the other, both sides pursuing perfect peace. In Ukraine, Russian soldiers will be quartered like chickens when the artillery opens up, and Ukrainians will take a last dying breath of dirt, too weakened by their wounds to roll over and die facing the sky.

Yeah. They used to tell you when a war ended. Now it most often never stops, or not for a couple of decades. The news anchor gives you the tip in terminology. A "soldier" will probably leave a country after a war. Anyone called a "fighter" will stay in the country because he lives there, as in Hamas "fighters" and Israeli "soldiers." Or Taliban "fighters" and American "soldiers." When the soldiers leave, the fighters continue to scrap, most often with each other. It's what would happen (and nearly has) if the police pulled out of Chicago and went to a safe suburb to attend a parade in their honor.

They're all gone now, all the men of all the nationalities who fought World War I, and their war is over because we're forgetting it, as we do when all the survivors are dead. It's how we go on, and how we never stop fighting and killing and deciding which deaths are "atrocities" and which will bring perfect peace and an end to war.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

Photo credit: Benjamin Faust at Unsplash