by Tom Barnes, Staff Writer
This article is not going to win me any awards or gain me any friends. So be it. But it has to be said. A huge slice of the 25 million or so American Veterans community is filled with loony tunes.
I am a totally disabled (IU) veteran, a retired Coast Guard warrant officer and I spend a great deal of time inside the veterans community, expecially here in the DC area where I live. I have spent a lot of time working on veterans issues in the past with House staffers on various pertinent issues. I personally lobby for disabled veterans issues and spend a great deal of time doing so. My own disability case was something of a nightmare and is not a story I enjoy telling.
The D.V.A. is essentially caring and helpful I believe but the mechanisms and time frames that they operate under are geologic. They do not operate in human time frames. They consider it a job well done when a disability case is started, adjudicated and finished prior to the next Ice Age. There is obviously little to no basic workload accountabilty in any sense that is helpful to American Veterans. It is frankly an experience almost no one involved is happy experiencing. But this is not really the crux of what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the state of mind of American veterans.
Now obviously I am not a psychiatrist or a mental health expert in any way. But I have spent so much time around veterans that I feel a certain kinship on a mental level. I am going to state my case plainly now. A huge number of veterans are nuts.
Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were only the tip of the iceberg. An undetermined amount of American Veterans are caught up in far Right (maybe even far Left?) nut groups like militias and fundamentalist Christian apocalyptic bunches that openly advocate actions to bring about the Second Coming of Christ. Generally speaking, that means starting a war in the Middle East. How quaint, eh? That does not take into account the huge number of American veterans involved with such lovely groups as the skinheads and other ne-Nazi crazies, the Ku Klux Klan (I was raised a Catholic so the Klan is not my favorite outft) or the hundreds of other far right groups that seem to spring up in America advocating the violent overthrow of the American government. This must number in the high hundreds of thousands at least would be my guess.
Why?
Have you ever actually seen the American Government at work? Pack up the car and move out here to the DC area for a month or two. Why not? Chances are you just lost your minimum wage job if you are a disabled veteran. I mean, it is not like you do not have the time now. So come on out here. Wait until you see this place.
As President Kennedy said, Washington D.C. is a city that reflects Northern charm and Southern efficiency, in other words it is all backwards in just about every way. Everything moves at a glacial pace, no one agrees with the guy they sit next to in their own carpool concerning virtually anything. The people sitting on the metro going back and forth to work to their government jobs think about nothing every day except their retirement. That includes the 23 year olds that got out of college last semester. This place would drive Machiavelli insane. The only thing dangerous out here are the bus drivers. What is there to overthrow?
I have spent decades listening to veterans complain about how the government is screwing them. You know what? YOU are the government. Now I am fully aware that there will always be groups of very influential people on the Left and the Right who are constantly jockeying for position to push their agenda forward over the guy on the opposite side of the issue. I live here. Trust me. It would be impossible to get any agenda through in a timely manner out here. Preparing for a violent overthrow of the American Government is pretty much like preparing for a violent overthrow of your four year old daughter’s upcoming birthday party. You will show up much too heavily armed if you simply bring your common sense. Weapons are completely unnecessary.
Shooting a government clerk is like stabbing the local mailman. You would be severely punished and frankly, the man is so miserable with his lot in life anyway, he might not even notice. The point I am trying to make is that talking about violent overthrow of the American Government is essentially goofy. And many disabled veterans often do it as a sort of default cliche fallback position to the incompetency with which they have been handled by the various parts of the "system" that they are locked into. That would be things like veterans groups, the D.V.A., the state office of veterans affairs, taking a civil service test yet again to try and get veterans preference from OPM, being constantly contacted over the phone by phony veterans groups asking for money,etc.
Veterans need to realize that acting crazy and talking nonsense is what people expect from us. It does not work anymore. No one listens. So please, do yourself and do us a favor. Try and limit the crazy behavior to your choices of movies down at Blockbuster okay? It does not impress Americans anymore because they have come to expect it from us.
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