Yesterday the world remembered them. Today, they will be forgotten all over again. Yesterday they were honored across nations. Tomorrow they will have the same memories they did the day before, the week before, the years before. What did Veteran's Day and Remembrance Day change for any of them?
Did the day of parades and speeches change their lives, lighten their burdens, ease their minds or mend their wounds? Did ceremonies in front of monuments replace the living monuments of sacrifice they all truly are?
We humble citizens of all nations glorify them twice a year. On Veteran's Day we acknowledge, or are at least supposed to, the living who have risked their lives. On Memorial Day we acknowledge those who lost their lives. The rest of the year we ignore them.
We ignored the wounded who must wait for the gratitude of this nation to catch up to their needs and then expect them to be grateful for the compensation and medical care they would not have needed had they not been wounded.
We ignore the veterans who become homeless, wandering the streets and trying to find room in shelters, a kind word, or even a smile instead of being avoided as people cross the street so they do not have to come into contact with them. We have failed at truly honoring any of them.
Canada, England and the United States, among all nations, will face the needs of veterans until they stop raising up armies to defend their nations. They will face horrible wounds, broken minds and families left behind until wars are waged no more. This is never fully committed to. This is never fully understood. It is a debt that becomes the last to be paid when it should have been the first one considered before the first order has been given.
We spend billions of dollars attempting to develop the most lethal weapons to win. We invest billions more on medical treatments to keep the death count low. Politicians wage verbal wars to support what they want to do as the profits are made for corporations dedicated to combat and then we wonder why so little in the form of peace is accomplished. Defense contractors, once treated as a necessary evil are in the business of war and peace is not good for their investors. What all nations find they are unwilling to do is care for the wounded their orders for war created.
Horrible wounds you can see with your eyes. Yesterday the Military Channel had a program on the wounded with missing limbs, blown off faces being reconstructed and the results of their service. Then there are wounds no one can see with their own eyes but are found in the eyes of the wounded. Memories of war as real today as the year they occurred. Sights, sounds, smells come back to life, penetrating their nights and haunting their days. The things they carry with them are a burden for them everyday of their life, yet we ignore them.
If you or I were ever truly considering honoring them, none of what happens to them would ever be tolerated. There would be no backlog of claims for the wounded as they wait for the words of gratitude to materialize and their bills pile up because they can no longer support themselves and their families. There would be no more homeless veterans walking our streets because we would rather see a monument built to justify our own ignorance than we would see shelters built to care for them, help them, treat them and cause them to feel they were in fact lucky to survive to return to a grateful nation. How are showing gratefulness when they no longer have a home of their own? How are we showing it when the system designed to treat the wounded becomes and enemy to them? How are we showing what we say, words of glory and appreciation, when what we do is forget them when they need us?
We are always looking for them to be prepared to risk their lives. We are always there to expect them to be more than humans with the ability to kill on command and then adapt to a civil life once more. We expect them to put it all behind them, get over it, when the horrors of war live in their minds. Yet we never really think about what they ask of us. The battles the veterans from past wars fought are still being fought today but it is not guns, bullets and bombs they fear the most. It is us.
Kathie Costos
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington
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