Unite
and Provide
“If
you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places
where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity…I’m appalled by how
much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are
from one another, and not on the things that unite us?”
Rachel
Yehuda (as quoted by Sebastian Junger in Tribe, p. 127)
As I’ve
mentioned before, I’ve been reading Sebastian Junger’s book, Tribe. Junger
has spent much of his career as a war correspondent, embedded with our troops
around the world. He has lived their experiences and Tribe is his
research and first-hand knowledge about what happens in different societies to
men and women who spend time in combat and then return home. It is a book that
I think every American should read. Sebastian Junger writes, “The United
States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be
the United State herself…”
He writes about combat that
is remote rather than up close and personal—as it would be for Afghans or Iraqis,
for instance. When the war is happening in one’s own country, everyone is
involved, and everyone is experiencing the effects of combat and the
dislocation and terror that comes with it. It is a shared event and tends to
bond rather than divide a society. But when the war is being fought far away,
as it is for Americans, we tend to have a fairly cavalier attitude about it. When
our military men and women come home, having risked their lives for this
country, and find us at war with each other, they question what their service
was for. Especially damaging are the political wars that are going on now
between conservatives and liberals in which much needed projects are neglected
because our leaders will not agree on anything, and the spiteful in-fighting to
keep the other side of the aisle from winning any vote—that negates what our
troops have fought and died for. The suicide rate among our returning troops is
staggering, especially among those who are active but non-deployed—more than twice what it
is in the civilian population. When our service members fare better on a
battlefield than they do at home, we need to reassess.
We have an all-volunteer
military now, so one assumes that people go into the armed services because
they want to, and because they see themselves as suited to the work. But that
does not negate our responsibility to them, especially after they return to
civilian life. Saying “thank you for your service” pays meager lip-service
but does not provide the strong underpinning safety-net that is needed, let alone the true embrace of a grateful nation. If I were queen of the world, I
would end all wars this minute, but as long as we find it somehow necessary to
send our young people into combat, we must also be prepared to support them
when they return—not by prattling on about how proud we are of them, but by providing
meaningful work and excellent medical care for them for as long as they live.
The best way to lower the
suicide rate among our veterans is to be the country they thought they were defending—to
unite and cooperate and greet them with love and appreciation. To enfold them
into our communities and to show them the respect they deserve. I hope we are
up to the task.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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