Musings on the eve of Veteran's Day
Just some thoughts.
I'm really glad to see how much care is given to so many of our recent vets. Not all of them. For sure the VA is overwhelmed, but with the people standing up and funding private organization, there are resources. I wish sincerely it were our government keeping its promise to vets, but at least their most pressing needs are, for the most part, being met.
For the last few decades, not a Veteran's Day has gone by that I don't think of the now almost invisible forgotten and forsaken vets who are my far less fortunate contemporaries. As so much is done for modern vets, so little was done for so many Viet Nam vets. Next time you notice that rare being, a sixty-some or seventy-some homeless man, consider that he may have been that way since he unceremoniously returned from a war, fucked up, and was abandoned by his government.
The government has also done good things for its vets. Just by way of first hand example, I completed my education complements of Uncle Sam. I was able to purchase my first home, when that same Uncle guaranteed the loan and made sure the rate was below market.
Veteran's Day has it roots in Britain's Remembrance Day. Back then, it was to honor the UK's dead in WWI.
While we still have an obligation to remember those who left it all in service to our country, the day we call Veteran's Day also recognizes the living. Of late, while the Middle East wars are fucked up and occurred for fucked up reasons, at lest the vets aren't victims a second time, when they return and muster out. That is, indeed, a good thing.
On this Veteran's Day, a good thing to do would be to consider putting pressure on our government to fully fund the Veteran's Administration. While the NGOs do a credible job, they let the NATION off the hook. The vets are vets because we asked them to be. We OWE them when they return.
Our country gets all self-congratulatory when we do something out of the ordinary for vets. But it won't be until doing for vets IS ordinary that we will, as a people, have held up our end of the bargain.
And maybe - just maybe - those sixty- and seventy-something invisible men will have a better end than was their lives.
If you're a vet, please accept, from this vet, my sincere thanks for your service.
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