Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Why, in Fayette this year, did observance of Veterans Day just about disappear?

It seems like Veterans Day disappeared this year.

Does Fayette County not celebrate this most important and patriotic day honoring those who have served our country? Or did everyone responsible for publicity this year just drop the ball? I’m astonished there isn’t more of an outcry for more substance on this special day, a day ripe with educational value. Especially as young Americans are serving and dying right now in the war on Iraq.

I admit, our family also nearly forgot Veterans Day. If it hadn’t been for a small mention of the Nov. 11 holiday in another book we were reading for a home school lesson, we probably would have gone on in oblivion like the rest of this area seems to have done. I’ve spoken to schoolteachers and even veterans that didn’t even realize they had missed it.

After my son and I checked out two books from the Peachtree City library, one all about Veterans Day (I learned so much reading it with my young son!) and the other a beautiful picture book about “The Star Spangled Banner,” our next goal was to find a local parade to attend Tuesday.

I carefully read through the Wednesday and Friday editions of The Citizen (a refreshingly unusual newspaper in that it is markedly more conservative and patriotic in tone than most others), and not even one mention of Veterans Day was found, much less parade information.

There were even old photos of Fayette servicemen as part of Bruce Jordan’s historical story, and a story by Carolyn Cary about a Fayette service member being honored by the Sons of the American Revolution (on Saturday, Nov. 15!), but the events calendar jumped from Nov. 8 right past Veterans Day to Nov. 12.

I was amazed. I also felt badly for my old coworkers at The Citizen, who I imagined had proudly sent the Friday paper off to the printer Thursday chock full of great local news and election results, only to realize with horror that they had forgotten to even mention Veterans Day. No parade information or cute little flag with “Happy Veterans Day” on the front page, nothing. None of the other local papers had anything either.

I was even more amazed when not even the Atlanta paper or Atlanta’s own CNN made mention of Veterans Day on their web sites. Apparently CNN.com and Yahoo News had no room on their full web pages for honoring our veterans, even though most of the top news stories Monday and even Tuesday morning were about deaths (of veterans, I may add) in Iraq.

Several attempts to search the web were unsuccessful at shedding any light on where a local parade might be, or if there would even be one this year. At least I did find a Veterans Day teacher’s guide and Letter from the President on the government’s web page, so I could show my son something. Even my home school group’s activity calendar had no listing of a parade or special event. At one point, after seeing parade information for plenty of other cities, I turned to ask my husband, “How far a drive is it to Augusta?”

(Here is a pause to admit I was searching for this information late Monday night, when I couldn’t phone the local veterans clubs or the one listing I did finally find on the web for the Atlanta Veterans Day parade planning committee.)

Miraculously on Tuesday morning I finally found a listing for the Atlanta parade (hooray!) buried on the WSB web site, with the 11 a.m. time and even directions. Somewhere amongst my web searches I had also discovered that here in Fayette County, the children of Brooks Elementary School would also be holding a little parade at 9 a.m.

So my pre-K son and I set off Tuesday morning on our field trip, dressed in red, white and blue with Old Glory in hand, and singing our small repertoire of patriotic songs.

First stop: Brooks. After a late start, the small parade began at the elementary school, wound around about four blocks to “downtown,” then doubled back and returned to the school.

We were pleased with the classes’ efforts: Adorably decorated kids proudly paraded floats made from wagons, including two Army tanks, a U.S.S. Enterprise aircraft carrier, and more than one Uncle SAM. There was a police car, a fire truck (driven by Rick Ryckeley, who also writes columns for The Citizen) and an authentic Army jeep and trailer.

After the Army jeep and before the children’s classes came nine Shriner vehicles, eight convertibles and one that looked like a modified ice cream truck, plus some Shriner clowns. (Can anyone tell me what they were doing in that parade, anyway? If the Shriners were all veterans, at least they could have had a little sign on their cars saying so.)

As they passed by the second time in their red fezzes, I leaned over to my son (whom I had been so diligently teaching about military and patriotic stuff for several days) and mentioned that no, those were not military hats. All that aside, it was a wonderful effort and we enjoyed the parade.

Then we raced back to Peachtree City, picked up my dad (who by the way served two years during the Vietnam War) and followed the directions to the Atlanta Veterans Day parade on Peachtree Street. I don’t like driving downtown, and after much frustration and several long wrong turns, finally found an illegal place to park for the last 10 minutes we had in our schedule for watching the parade.

What was nice about our convoluted drive, though, was that we ended up seeing the parade from the back forward, as we passed all the floats and military units waiting to begin their march. Conveniently, after parking we came out on the parade sidelines right at the beginning, very near the grandstand where the dignitaries were seated. We were regaled with patriotic music, crisp formations of every branch of military service, and even three tanks showing off their huge anti-aircraft guns like three large synchronized swimmers.

It was a fantastic parade, with a rather sparse crowd in a metro area as large as ours. It’s truly a shame that all the Fayette schools didn’t take a field trip to the parade (I remember doing that when I was in school) and spend the day learning more tangibly the valuable Veterans Day lessons of patriotism, freedom and the like. It would even have been nice if they formed their own county parade.

Instead, I guess our school system has decided it was more educationally valuable for the kids to sit in their classrooms and read a textbook or maybe watch a parade on their classroom TVs. What a superb opportunity missed to learn with all the senses!

I can’t wait to go earlier next year (maybe someone else will drive), park in a better place, and bring a crowd of Fayette County folks with me. Won’t you plan to join us? And a belated thank you to all of you who served our country and had even just a little part in protecting our treasured freedoms. God bless you, and God bless America!

Savannah Rogers

Peachtree City, Ga.