Who Shall We Honor?
In the US, today is Memorial Day, when we are to honor warriors who died in our side of wars. In addition we are to honor all our warriors on Veterans’ Day, and our first warriors and politicians on Independence Day. We also have days to honor wartime politicians, one warring explorer, all mothers, all fathers, and "laborers" (i.e., most all of us).
Yes warriors, dead and otherwise, deserve some honor, but to me this seems all out of proportion. Not only do we overemphasize warriors of dramatic battles we won (e.g., not WWI trench doughboys), but surely many others deserve honor. How about warriors who died on other sides, or in other wars? How about civilians who died or sacrificed in wars? How about those who prevented wars?
And surely war should not be the main source of honor in our world! How about holidays to honor those who died for or sacrificed for or at least benefited the rest of us in other ways? For example, why not a day to honor volunteers? Or a day to honor all explorers, including intellectual, artistic, and business explorers? Why focus so much on our winning dead warriors?
Added: Yes our ancestors probably evolved warrior honor to get people to defend their tribe. But shall we on reflection endorse or repudiate these feelings?
Human societies run on a combination of violence (or the threat of violence), and bullshit (or mass belief in untrue things). Without people willing to believe in the bullshit enough to back it up with violence, our current civilization would come to an end. Hence the need to honor the warrior ethic.
Here's one possibility: they ran out of other excuses for a holiday.
In England quite a lot of people believe we should have another public holiday in the year, particularly as we have none between the last Monday of August and Christmas. One of the problems is that no-one has any idea what to name it after. The only two serious possibilities - apart from national patron saint days, which are in the wrong time of the year - are "Britishness Day" and "Veterans' Day". Despite being the frontrunners both are anathema to British culture, which views flag-waving and military-worship with suspicion. (You can come up with various reasons for this, from post-Empire angst to being brought up watching films of swastika-waving Nazis and being told "That is bad, we fought so we didn't have to do that".)
The fact that we can't think of any universally appealing excuses for a public holiday suggests there aren't very many available, once you've used up the religious festivals that don't offend non-believers, days of historical significance, etc. So perhaps the thought process is not "We need to honour soldiers, let's have a holiday" but "We need a holiday, let's... uh... honour soldiers". The question "so why soldiers" remains but is less significant.