Ok, so first of all it's bad enough that we've been in war for years for no good reason, and don't even get me started on how the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi people, including lots of children, somehow don't matter as much as the 2000 people killed on 9/11.
But so ok, I don't think it's my place to completely divulge who these people are online, so if you want details I'll tell you, but basically both of these vets served in the military for many years. And one is currently in one of the VA hospitals that was left open after Bush closed a bunch, and he's being treated for post traumatic stress disorder over 20 years after he finished his service. The other person is currently in jail (even tho technically she should have been released one month and 2 days ago, but the papers just haven't been processed yet WTF) for an incident related to psychiatric problems for which she has not gotten (and probably won't get once she's released) adequate treatment.
And both of them happen to be black, which is significant because the proportion of black and latino people enlisting in the military has been much higher than that of white citizens (which is another issue in and of itself). And I don't want to argue that they're not getting proper care because they're black, but rather that the lack of treatment and proper care only compounds the social disadvantages of being a person of color in this country.
Recently I've realized that thinking about things in terms of family can be quite useful. For example, that when you raid communities and deport undocumented workers they often are seperated from their children who are American citizens. Thinking about it like that makes it more accessible because we can all imagine how horrible it would be to be forcefully seperated from our parents or children or family. And in this case, when you have a relative or friend in jail, you experience the extra burden of stress in your life, and then this stress disporportionately affects people of color. Like just think about how you'd feel if your relative was mentally unwell, in jail even though they should have been released, and not getting proper medical/psychiatric help, and then of course that's all in addition to handling your everday life stuff like going to school or work or whatever.
Anyway, it just seem ironic that I hear about these two stories on the same day and it happens to be a national holiday. For me these examples show how interconnected all of the injustice in this country is, and how the prison industrial complex, and military recruitment, and anti-immigration policies are not only inhumane, and not only are they damaging for individual people, but that they have terrible consequences for families and children, especially those from communities that are already most vulnerable.
So in conclusion, until this country makes it a priority to take care of its most vulnerable children and families I can't be proud to be American.
kind of related:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07
http://www.latimes.com/business
the first one is about contractors suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and not getting proper medical attention cuz the companies they work for dont do follow up psychological tests or whatever, and the second is about how now there are more private contractors than military personel in iraq, which is creepy cuz we're moving from a military occupation to an economic one.
2 comments:
you know, I think this is part of the way in which the US promotes militaristic patriotism by being such a security state (and as such waging wars all the time_), but at the same time there is a trend of hiding the violent aspects of war. I think the lack of visibility of veterans and veterans' mistreatment is part of this. But to me this all runs along the lines of not showing the coffins of soldiers, not publishing the civilian casualties of the war, and showing the deaths of the "other" - afghani, iraqi, but not showing the dead american soldiers.
Plus, let's remember how this is part of a tactic that makes militarism, war, and state violence appealing to the public, such that it's patriotic to support a war and unpatriotic to protest it.
so by hiding the human violence of war, it pushed those affected (in this case, veterans), into the shadows and further pushes them out of the public eyes through systematic imprisonment and allowing them to fall through the cracks, leading to homelessness, etc.
it sucks man. I totally agree. and no one really knows about it, which is even worse. But "supporting our troops" people have no idea that that means supporting a state system that uses people like playthings (GI joe comes to mind) and disposes of them when it's no longer convenient.
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