I had a great little story line going for yesterday’s Daily. It had everything, or would have, if I hadn’t spent the morning at the Culpeper branch of the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles office, on the left just off Lover’s Lane. They work miracles there- they can actually make time stop.

Virginia is for lovers, after all. I saw that on bumper stickers back in the day when decals didn’t necessarily get. your car trashed while you were inside getting trashed. But what the heck. “O Tempore, O mores!”

Like a lot of folks, I was amazed by the vitality of the surviving Vets of World War Two. They were front and center in the 75th commemoration of the landings in Normandy. Some of them dozed while the Presidents spoke, and one 97-year-old actually jumped out of a vintage C-47 Dakota aircraft onto the fields where he had arrived so long ago.

There were differences, of course. This time it was daylight and they could see the actual landing zone and there are no Nazis left in Normandy to flood them and drown the kids of the 101st and 82nd Airborne.

In a candid interview with the vets, one was asked if he would be back for the 80th anniversary, he just laughed and said “no.” For him, and most of the rest of comrades will be gone by then.

We lost the last of the Doolittle Raiders this year. Normandy will be next.

I was mulling that over, and it struck me that this seemed familiar. Back in the early 1960s we were building to the Centennial of the American Civil War. That was the worst thing we have ever done to ourselves so far, anyway, and with a century between us at the time there was a tinted romance to the old silver plate pictures of the young men who were offering their bodies in service to the ideas for which they fought.

I am only mildly surprised that it is all back. I wrote a piece a few years ago on the solemnity and wonder I felt at a visit to Appomattox in the twilight. That after such horror, at the end of things, there was a certain mutual respect regardless of how it turned out. In those days, I was attempting to cross-flack the stories and somehow monetize them. I would post on Facebook and Twitter to invite attention.

In response to my innocuous (though evocative) post, some troll retweeted and lit me a new orifice, maintaining that I was not only ignorant, but probably a (fill in the blank of the “ists” for which we are eligible to pronounced these days by our betters).

Before the end of their time on this planet, they formed a gigantic organization of Union Veterans literally ran the political system until they could no longer stand. What was left of the legions before the Centennial were some ancient men who had been youthful bugle boys in the struggle.

The winners called their organization the “Grand Army of the Republic.” In little cities in Pennsylvania and Ohio, you can still see the brick buildings where they shared passion, memories and politics before they crossed the Styx.

It is much the same for the kids who came home after Normandy, got an education, started families and showed up for work for more than a half century.

But for some reason, we seem determined to plow this ground again. Have we not learned anything?

Apparently not. Time has not stopped. Just our understanding of it.

I will get back to important stuff like the DMV tomorrow.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com