They'll never learn to fish right

The fishing net is thousands of years old. It looks pretty much the same as it did when it was first put together. It serves the same purpose. It hauls in as many fish as possible. A rod can only catch one at a time but a net can haul in enough to feed a village.

The problem with all of these groups online is that they are all using a pole with a tiny worm instead of one huge net. Too many veterans needing help are slipping through them as they all try to make a name for themselves.

Years ago, when I got into this, there were very few sites for veterans and even less working on PTSD. I've watched them spring up over the last seven years or so and I've been scratching my head wondering what is wrong with them. Great ideas? Great devotion? Great plans? Great connections? They all have something to offer but they all lack something as well. Who are they really serving? When will they work together? Are they even interested?

I've worked with several groups starting out behind the scenes and I watched them grow then watched them fall apart. The dedication was not there, connections were pulled by other groups, funding never came and most of them were too much in a hurry to rush in and get busy instead of learn what was already available, what was already known and what was needed to be done.

They are using a shrimp fork to harpoon a whale.

The other problem is politics. Nasty little varmint attacking unsuspecting do-gooders actually still able to believe in the better angels of man being able to rise above any political motivation for the greater good. They never got the memo those days are long gone and banned from returning to the citizenry as long as talk radio dictates what they will pay attention to, what they will forward off to their friends in the email community. Why they cannot read for themselves and think for themselves vanished from their minds as soon as they saw other seekers of truth shunned from the community of the "friends" they thought they had. Intimidation, the ultimate betrayal, when it comes to noble causes they thought they were getting into, reduced them into wondering why they cared in the first place.

The disillusioned joined the detached. The conservatives finally figured out that what they were conserving was compassion. The liberals ended up liberating themselves of responsibility. Every man was in it for themselves, begging and scratching for every dime they could manage to squeeze out of every tightwad's fist. This left normal people wondering what the point is of even trying when they know they will only end up like one of them one way or the other. But they made more rods instead of nets.

One man can hold onto a rod but it takes cooperation to spread a net and haul it in without losing any fish as they do. It takes people working together for the greater good. The guy standing alone can look as if he's accomplishing something but while the sun goes down and he's still trying to real in that one fish, the nets have already been hauled in and the ship has returned to shore. The older groups that have been around for a long time helping all veterans, they are experts on nets and they also know how to take care of those they catch before they sink. The newer groups, well, they want to reinvent the net so they can claim it as their own without realizing they will end up owning what they fail to learn in the process. Veterans have not changed and PTSD is still the same. The need is the same but it's getting worse. Before there used to be too little help to find. Now there is too much help to find but hardly none of it has been vetted or tested by time. We need to fix this and get the groups working together and actually start to help the veterans we all claim to want to help.