Veterans Day 2018

The holiday this year feels like more of a hypocrisy than usual. I'm one of those rebels who thinks that "honoring" someone requires more than waving appropriately-colored cloths and speaking platitudes at parades or charity events once each year.

If a society wants to honor the service that people give to their country, then society should provide concrete help to them in their time(s) of need. Yes, even if it means raising taxes to pay for the cost of war long after the gunfire itself is over. And there is plenty of need, daily. Among the homeless in the good ol' USA:

many veterans are homeless in America—between 130,000 and 200,000 on any given night
23% of homeless population are veterans
46% age 45 or older compared to 20% non-veterans
- http://nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/veterans.html

Similar numbers are reported by the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

Each year, VA’s specialized homelessness programs provide health care to almost 150,000 homeless veterans
40,056 veterans are homeless on any given night
20% of the male homeless population are veterans
50% are age 51 or older, compared to 19% non-veterans
- http://nchv.org/index.php/news/media/background_and_statistics/

Trump keeps asking (and getting) increased military budget. That's just good business, after all. But when it comes to the well being of the actual service members, there are no profitable business deals to be signed for the care of old and damaged human beings.

Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie said Friday that he has begun forming a plan to cut the agency’s budget as President Donald Trump requested during a Cabinet meeting last month.
- https://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/va-secretary-has-begun-planning-budget-cuts-requested-by-trump-1.556017

President Donald Trump's proposals to cut eligibility for food stamps in 2018 would hit hard on thousands of military families...
about 23,000 active duty service members received food stamps in 2013
- https://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/05/24/proposed-food-stamp-cuts-would-hit-military-families.html

Sure, the Veterans Administration has major issues. It needs a severe overhaul.

Ignored claims, manipulated records, cost overruns and even one facility infested with insects and rodents are among the latest issues uncovered by a blistering VA Inspector General’s report. The auditor's probe found that more than 31,000 inquiries placed by veterans to the Philadelphia Regional VA office call center went ignored for more than 312 days, even though they were supposed to be answered in five. Perhaps even worse, claim dates were manipulated to hide delays, $2.2 million in improper payments were made because of duplicate records, 22,000 pieces of returned mail went ignored and some 16,600 documents involving patient records and dating back to 2011 were never scanned into the system.
- https://www.foxnews.com/politics/new-va-scandals-call-into-question-agencys-ability-to-clean-house

But this Republican administration is not calling for an overhaul of the bureaucracy at the Veterans Administration. They're just calling for a smaller budget. So let us honor the veterans on Veterans Day, but let's do it Trump style. Speeches and parades, but nothing substantive. Oh, wait, let's skip the platitudes too.

A so-called travel lid was called around 10 a.m. Eastern, meaning the president was not going to leave the White House. There were no public events scheduled for the president on the Veterans Day holiday.
- https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-today-staying-home-on-veterans-day-president-says-stock-market-is-rattled-by-prospect-of-democratic-harassment-2018-11-12

Sure, conservatives like to cut funding for efforts to address so-called "social services" like health care, mental health care, affordable housing, affordable food, job training, and continuing education. (Basically, all the stuff that makes a society worth living in.)  Meanwhile, they continue to create more people who need exactly those services. Sounds like a winning strategy to me. So sayeth this holiday curmudgeon.

If you want to do something that actually helps, then consider donating to non-profits that focus on care for veterans. After you do that, ask yourself why you had to bother making an individual donation instead of building a society that made this care mandatory. Which method, really, is the better way to honor veterans? Are these humans just disposable and temporary personnel assets, or are they (and our obligations to them) part-and-parcel of what makes a society actually function, worthy of both building together and defending afterwards?