Reward for Service Rendered

I don't come from a hardcore military family. A relative on my mother's side of the family fought for the Union in the Civil War. My Grandfather enlisted in the Navy and served one stint before World War I. My father was drafted in the mid Fifties and served his tour as a clerk in a Signal Company. So I have no personal axe to grind as far as the subject of this post goes. I do have friends who have served in the recent past. A former coworker at the theatre served in the Marine Corps. One of my engineers has a brother in the Army who is based out of Fort Hood here in Texas. He just got back from Iraq a few months ago, and is scheduled to return for another rotation later this year. I wrote about the ridiculousness of short rotations off for the personnel serving in Iraq and Afghanistan here and here. Another former coworker has a brother who is currently deployed in Iraq. I imagine that I share these examples of two and three degrees of separation with about everyone in the US these days.

I do have an axe to grind about the dignity and honor that is the right of every man and woman who takes the oath to defend the Constitution and the US as a member of the Armed Forces. In doing so, they are choosing to place their lives on the line to preserve our right to (for the moment) live where we want, associate with who we want, and say what we want about pretty much anything we want to. Whether or not I agree with the policies of an administration that sends them off to fight an ill advised war, I have the utmost respect for the commitment of these individuals.

This latest example of inane, gross neglect in the VA hospital scandal is too extreme for words and almost unbelievable to me. The fact that a decorated veteran would be shunted around like this and then dumped off in his own driveway to die underscores the root dehumanization of anyone who is part of the mechanisms that the current administration is using in its illegal excursions and adventures throughout the world.

The military personnel serving and returning from Iraq and Afghanistan need to know that the government is going to be there for them to uphold its end of the agreement they embarked upon when they signed their Oath of Service, which, by the way, is to the Constitution and the Country, not the aspirations of the administration currently in place. Part of this oath is an implicit trust placed in the officeholder of the Presidency that, as their Commander-in-
Chief, that individual will be able to differentiate between politics and the practical defense of the Country and its citizens. It may be a naive expectation, but it is there, and the abuse of it is unforgivable, especially from a group such as the current administration and some of its former members (save one exception who didn't exactly distinguish himself during the first administration) who have very little active military experience and who have been shown to have done whatever they could to avoid service when the call was likely to come.

This pack of privileged back scratching opportunists who have wormed their way into the highest levels of our government and are abusing and desecrating every and any part of the government that, however disfunctional it may be, does keep the country going and places, for the most part, the welfare of its citizens at the top of the list of priorities. The only way that there is even a prayer of a chance for this issue to get addressed properly is for the representatives in Congress to keep hearing about it and how unacceptable it is from their constituents, not just from the mainstream media while it's the hot story in the current news cycle (unlike the independent media, which broke the story two years ago).

I'm off to Mike and Julie's farm in Moravia for a few days to recharge my batteries and help them celebrate their third anniversary. I can't decide whether I'm going to take the Compy with me, so there may be nothing from this end of things for a day or two. Everyone have a great weekend!