"As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them." - John F. Kennedy
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Just in time for Memorial Day, we're once again being treated to a generous serving of praise and grandstanding by politicians and corporations eager to go on record as being supportive of our veterans.
Patriotic platitudes aside, however, America has done a deplorable job of caring for her veterans. We erect monuments for those who die while serving in the military, yet for those who return home, there's little honor to be found.Despite the fact that the U.S. boasts more than 23 million veterans who have served in World War II through Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan, the plight of veterans today is deplorable, with large numbers of them impoverished, unemployed, traumatized mentally and physically, struggling with depression, thoughts of suicide, and marital stress, homeless (a third of all homeless Americans are veterans), subjected to sub-par treatment at clinics and hospitals, and left to molder while their paperwork piles up within Veterans Administration (VA) offices.
According to the National Veterans Foundation, the VA has had a backlog of as many as 1.2 million unprocessed claims in recent years, in addition to the fraud and mismanagement within the VA and its network of offices across the country, and secret lists containing thousands of names of veterans who were forced to wait months just to see a doctor.
While President Obama has now declared that he "will not stand" for the mistreatment of veterans under his watch, the time for words is long past. As
Slate political correspondent John Dickerson observed, these inexcusable delays represent "a failure of one of the most basic transactions government is supposed to perform: keeping a promise to those who were asked to protect our very form of government."
Comment: It's not so much Washington's plan to conquer the world as it is that Washington already believes itself to have already conquered the world, and someone is standing up to say, 'No, the facts on the ground state otherwise.'
This, from the horse's mouth, neatly sums up America's official position on the EU: In other words, it's our colony on the 'World-Island' landmass!
As for this being a 20-year-long conflict, arguably it's part of a pattern that is HUNDREDS of years old! Before Brzezinski there was Halford Mackinder and before the U.S. obsession with making Russia out to be evil there was Britain's obsession with making Russia out to be evil.