THE BOSTICK REPORT-No doubt, you’ve heard, read, or seen much ballyhoo for Memorial Day this past weekend. It is the starting point for a patriotic summer, bookended with Veteran’s Day in November and the Fourth of July in the middle. Memorial Day kick-starts a run of parades, barbecues, and dances that really do help focus our culture on things of importance.
Were it not for these national holidays, we might risk losing – at a minimum – the acknowledgement of the sacrifice demanded of so many who fought in wars or stood at the ready during peace. Some of us go deeper than this superficial embrace of a soldier on these holiday markers and even consider the cultural cost of sending our boys and girls off to war.
Yet when it comes to meaningful support of veterans, we as lay citizens frequently fail to act on our intentions when it matters.
As you know, homelessness in the veteran community is rampant particularly in Los Angeles. Our media has done a fair, not excellent, but fair job at highlighting this as an epidemic and on each Memorial Day, many will likely give an impassioned speech as to the moral or ethical obligation we must act upon to support our returning veterans.
We live in a perversely disconnected world when it comes to fighting wars. There is no war tax and for most of the 13 years we have been engaged in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, there was no textural definition of the cost in lives that we spent fighting. Photographs of flag-draped caskets were largely banned and a volunteer-based military largely relied on its soldiers to re-enlist, each one expected to serve multiple tours in the field.
This has all resulted in the diminishment of the relationship between the public’s holiday rhetoric of support and the reality of life as a veteran. If we don’t see the dead bodies coming home and we don’t see our own children going off to war and we don’t pay for the wars from our own pockets and we don’t make it so our returning soldiers have a real shot at healing the damage our wars have inflicted upon them, then how can we really say we’re honoring our soldiers?
No Memorial Day can be held without grilling hot dogs. I say the reason we’re eating hot dogs should be because we spent our money on an extensive mental health network providing wrap-around services within housing constructed specifically to serve veterans. We should start sacrificing our wallets in order to ensure that our soldiers have a fighting chance.
What stops us from doing it? Simply put, we do. When we don’t demand our elected officials to fight for building supportive housing, we make sure that supportive housing doesn’t exist.
It’s all about fear. Prop 41 is a ballot measure coming up on June 3 that everyone should vote for. It will provide hundreds of millions of dollars to build multi-family housing options for low-income veterans. This will provide living environments with the kind of extensive mental health services that helps veterans reintegrate into our peacetime society.
You should vote for Prop 41. Even if you don’t, I think it will pass. But, the passage of this noble ballot measure will not solve our homeless veterans problem here in Los Angeles because passage only provides some funding. We need housing.
So, what will you do when you hear that a veterans’ housing center is being developed in your neighborhood? What will you do when you find out that someone wants to make it so that two dozen homeless veterans will be living in a proposed development down the block from you?
Will you stand up for our soldiers and act on the rhetoric you embraced this Memorial Day? Will you be patriotic in this case or will you fight it, meekly mumbling that you think it’s good and all that we provide for our veterans, but you don’t think THAT spot is the best place for THIS sort of project and why don’t THEY find somewhere more appropriate?
Make no bones about it, our returning veterans are scarred. They suffer from PTSD, alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness, and a general inability to return to normal life. Your instinct to protect yourself, your family, and your comfortable little life, are natural.
But, the rhetoric is right. We have a moral obligation to set that fear aside and welcome veterans into our lives – not just our hearts – and that means we welcome them into our neighborhoods.
(Odysseus Bostick is a Los Angeles teacher and former candidate for the Los Angeles City Council. He writes The Bostick Report for CityWatch.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 43
Pub: May 27, 2014