Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and we don’t have school off.

One hundred years ago, World War I started, and four years later, it ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. The bells rang, and the world celebrated the ending of the war to end all wars. We called it Armistice Day then, we call it Veterans Day now. Lord and Taylor has a sale, and there’s a big concert on the Mall. I even hear Rihanna will be there.

The Concert for Valor, as it has been aptly named, will draw thousands. And you all should go, because it’s Veterans Day, and it’s free.

As a veteran, it’s strange to think about celebrating Veterans Day by going to a concert. But then again, I’ve never figured out how to “celebrate” Veterans Day. I know it’s a day meant for the living, but many of us visit the dead or raise glasses to them. Others call their fellow comrades and wish them well. Distant family members text me “thank-yous,” and my mom calls me to exclaim, “I’m glad you’re home,” even though I came back from Afghanistan for the last time almost half a decade ago.

But that’s the thing: we’ve been at war for the last 13 years, and I don’t think America, collectively, knows what to do with its hands when November 11 comes around. Memorial Day has parades commemorating the fallen, with waving American flags and old-timers with the little pins in their flat-brimmed hats. But Veterans Day? It is met with a blank stare and a quiet, “Thank you for your service.”

Maybe, as our war in Afghanistan winds down and our new one in Iraq begins, we should, as a country, re-evaluate how we celebrate Veterans Day. Maybe we should take this one day out of the year to have concerts and events and forums that don’t just thank veterans for their service, but rather assess the relationship veterans have with the country they fight for, and the relationship the rest of the population has with the increasingly small percentage of Americans who choose to run toward the sound of the guns.

After so many years of war, that relationship has become a distant one and, in turn, has been summarized in one jargony phrase: the Civilian-Military Divide.

For the past decade, it has been bandied about with an increasing frequency, and veterans and civilians have stared at each other across a chasm of experiences asking one another how to get to the other side.

Though it seems the divide has been created by war, in reality it has been created by the choice to serve in the military and the choice to not. An all-volunteer military is one of the many things that makes our country great, and in that choice is the pitfall of misunderstanding. In the end, that’s what the civilian-military divide is. It is a euphemism for miscommunication, a polite way of saying: “us vs. them.”

That is why it falls on the individual, on fellow citizens, co-workers, students and veterans to make one another understand. It is on the veteran to represent their community well, to tell the stories that others cannot. So many people in this country have no real proximity to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but when a veteran has that rare moment to show someone what those wars look like, what they feel like, it is an opportunity that should be seized. When that veteran opens up and sticks out his or her hand to the uninformed individual, that veteran represents the tens of thousands of men and women that have come and gone before.

But it cuts both ways. Here at Georgetown, people are astonished to find out that I spent time in uniform. It is almost as if my appearance is off-putting. “That’s not what they’re supposed to look like,” is a sentiment I’ve received often. This campus is home to a diverse population, and with more than 500 students on the GI Bill, veterans are certainly a part of it.

Some of us sit in the back of the class, others the front. But seek us out, because when it comes down to it, we’re all of the same generation and one day, we’ll be running the show together. Might as well get on the same page sooner rather than later, right?

TM Gibbons-Neff is a senior in the College. He is the former executive editor of The Hoya.