It’s a little hard to see, but the cover of my first novel includes the famous photograph taken on Armistice Day: 11/11 at 11am. (If you have a copy of the book–and bless you if you do!–the time can be seen on the clock tower.) That day the streets were filled with joyous Parisians and American G.I.s celebrating together.

The name of this novel, The Last Day of the War, is meant to be bitter and ironic. Nov. 11 was not really the last day of World War One. Not long after that Nov. 11, thanks to a flawed peace agreement that was overly punitive and that also preserved imperialism, the world would soon be at war again, this time involved in a conflict that would lead to the coining of the word “genocide.” And then there would be wars in Asia and in the Mideast and the wars we fight today. An endless state of warfare.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” said Martin Luther King, Jr. in the midst of another bloody conflict, this one as old as the United States. I wish I believed in these words. I’m sorry to say that I don’t. At least this week, it seems to me the moral universe makes weak, sporadic appearances, then it sputters and stalls and gives way to a far more troubling, but very familiar universe. 

Still, on this Veterans Day, I thank all those soldiers who fight over and over and over again for a just world, including those who came out to their city squares last night in response to the United States’ appalling election results. In my own city of Madison, those soldiers were 2,000 strong. “Very unfair,” pouted our president-elect until someone took his tweet toy away. I say to him: perhaps it is time for you to learn that this is what democracy looks like.