A poppy on Veterans Day

Scripps Howard News Service: When Prince Charles and his duchess, Camilla, came to call at the White House last week, their aides all sported artificial red poppies in their lapels, a longstanding way of recognizing Nov. 11, what the British and the Commonwealth countries call Remembrance Day and we call Veterans Day.
If 1918 has any topical relevance, it is because it was the year of the Spanish flu, a lethal pandemic we fear may be repeated. But on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, four years of carnage on Europe's battlefields abruptly came to a halt. Among the first plants to reappear on those wastelands was the poppy, inspiring a Canadian officer, Lt. Col. John McCrae, to write a poem that began:
"In Flanders field the poppies grow
"Between the crosses row on row."
A waning custom
Thus began the tradition of handing out poppies to raise money for needy veterans and the families of the dead. In the years after World War II, poppy fund-raisers were ubiquitous. While the custom is honored elsewhere, it is sadly on the wane in the United States even though it was an American, Moina Michael, a YMCA worker and teacher at the University of Georgia, who started it.
The Veterans of Foreign Wars carries on handing out poppies, but its officials point out that the numbers of the generation that most embraced the custom, World War II vets, have fallen from 16 million to less than 4 million. And then there's the problem of finding the volunteers to do it. Finally, there's a typically American obstacle: Anti-solicitation statutes and fear of lawsuits are keeping volunteers out of the public buildings, intersections and stores where the poppies were traditionally handed out.
Maybe the poppy is as quaint as the giddy optimism of those back in 1918 who believed they had seen the war to end all wars. They were wrong, and that's why it is vital, as McCrae said in the mournful "In Flanders Field," that we do not break faith with those who fought then and those who are fighting now. Today, we honor them both