So many years later, fragmented memories from my time in Afghanistan still flood my head when I least expect them. Sometimes, I’ll push them out quickly; other times, particularly since my kids were born, they just won’t leave.
During an on-going debate about the future of the VHA, many a patriotic speech has been made about how much everyone in Washington loves and cares for veterans. But even a personal biography brimming with past military heroism can be deceiving.
When soldiers are idolized, respect for militarism and war grow accordingly. Military training, military expenditures, military intervention, and military escalation become ways to “support the troops” or, at the least, take on a friendlier glow.
As Louis Celli, a top staffer for the American Legion, told the Associate Press, a merger would siphon off funds from VHA hospitals and clinics and eventually shift costs directly to veterans, through co-pay and other possible fee increases.
On Veterans day, the idea of the veteran was touted by POTUS and his supporters as an emotional counterweight to the protesting athletes. Dr. Lisa Brock reminds us that African Americans have historically had a conflictual relationship with US militarism.
Approximately 1.8 million veterans in payroll jobs across the US would get a raise if Congress raised the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2024.
Nearly two-thirds of the veterans who would get the raise are age 40 or older, over 60% have some college experience, and nearly 70% work full time.
The real federal minimum wage peaked back in 1968.
A grassroots resistance to Trump Administration VA privatization schemes is being mounted by AFGE union members many of whom, at the VA, are veterans themselves,
The U.S. has now effectively traded a universal military draft for the far more insidious policy of economic conscription. And while it has become something of a ritual for civilians to address veterans with: “Thank you for your service,” to commend those who have voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way, the ritual also betrays a more profound reality. We are thankful we ourselves aren’t economically desperate enough to have to enlist in this country’s endless wars.
Why did so many veterans take up the cause of the Native Americans and environmentalists at Standing Rock? My own reasons are rooted in western Pennsylvania’s coal country, where I grew up.
Liberal opinion holds that the Vietnam War was a mistake. The right continues to see it as a noble cause. Author Michael Uhl calls the slaughter in Vietnam planned and deliberate, saying that the United States would not tolerate then or now efforts by people in the Global South to escape the imperialist trap. Uhl writes as a participant, first as an intelligence officer and then as an historian, to paint a merciless and highly detailed picture of US policy at its rawest.
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