Establishment Politicians Support Veterans and Helpless Others
You’ll never find grassroots scrappers like 78-year-old John McGraw in their midst, but entrenched Democrats and Republicans alike support veterans in their own fashion. Being against all wars is the surest way of reducing battlefield casualties. No wars, no one gets hurt. During the 1960s the strategy was to drive ROTC off campus and openly denounce members of the armed forces as mindless baby killers. No longer so straightforward.
Why would anyone want to go off to war when so much fun can be had on college campuses back home? But wars keep happening anyway. Aggressive nations attack softer ones, such as when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Insurgents and terrorists are more like freedom fighters trying to expel foreign capitalists and colonialists, aren’t they? What the Third World really needs is for the successful West to take charge of the less fortunate who, by definition, can’t help themselves. Charity and welfare have always been around, ennobling the giver much more than the receiver. A new form of “moral” colonialism, some might say, but now in disguise.
These days, the Western military powers are dedicated to nation-building as the most logical way to bring a diverse world into the likeminded democratic fold. First tear down the “loser” country, then build it up from scratch. International sporting and entertainment events give a glimpse of the new egalitarian utopia to be achieved. Computer technology will dazzle young people away from wanting to charge off to battle. Suppose they give a war and nobody comes.
In the US, nation-building in places like Iraq remains, it seems, the media-enabled goal of both political parties, using the subjugation of the American Indian as the how-to model for getting backward people up-to-speed with preferred lifestyles. Backward? Notice how help isn’t provided unless the society is portrayed as weak, problem-ridden, and seemingly without any moral bootstraps to pull themselves up by. Poverty and drunkenness everywhere, as news outlets remind us daily.
Veterans are now being portrayed the same way. Those who fought in the Vietnam War are just as likely to be debased today as they were back then. But now under cover of support. Sounds more positive. Hollywood would like to have us believe that the Vietnam war was lost because the soldiers were stoned and drunk all the time, perhaps in sympathy with the protesters back home. Simply not true.
As the decades have passed, Vietnam veterans have been brought as low as possible. Mental illness and PTSD plague even those who were never in combat. Those who aren’t successful in getting disability payments typically end up homeless, without food and shelter, leading a cheerless life still drunk under a bridge somewhere. Anyone who goes off to war must be prone to mental illness from the get go, as assumptions now seem to suggest. Like the Iraqis and Indians, veterans need lots of help. They’re starving and need money and food. More crisis lines will stave off inevitable suicides. See you in September!
