Shard Needs to Hit Dark Crystal of Congress

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
April 24, 2015

The headline being carried from the Washington Times to other sites screams "Palm to the head: VA manager forced underlings to pay his wife $30 for fortune telling" as if that was suppose to be the worst part of this latest hearing, but as bad as that may sound the rest of the article shows the crystal ball of the Congress is in such dire need of cleaning it has become the Dark Crystal.

"Then with the shard restored the three suns stood above the glowing crystal and flooded it with light." The Dark Crystal

Read this part and get a good laugh at what is "tragic" to a politician.

The hearing focused on problems with delivering veterans’ benefits and other services in Philadelphia and Oakland — two of the VA’s largest regional offices.

Rep. Ralph Abraham, Louisiana Republican, said the revelations made him “filled with anger.”

“How tragic is it in today’s VA system that the same veteran we trust our national security to and even our lives to, that same veteran can’t trust our VA system to take care of them?” Mr. Abraham said. “What I’m hearing today is a mismanagement of lives from our VA system. It goes to the very core of what this nation is supposed to be about.”

But Allison Hickey, VA undersecretary for benefits, said the agency’s problems are not “systemic.” Another VA official said many of the agency’s problems stem from a yearslong effort to convert paperwork for millions of veterans into digital files.

Here is another part from the same article

Mrs. Brown, a former employee in the VA’s Oakland office, was assigned one day in 2012 to a special team given the job of reviewing more than 13,000 veterans’ claims dating back to the mid-1990s that had never been addressed. As they sorted through the mounds of papers, she said, they often discovered that the veterans had long since died without receiving the requested benefits.

Mid 90's! Catch that part? I am sure you did however members of congress think we're stupid. They forget that the veterans community pays attention no matter which party is in control as if our lives depended on what they do, or fail to do, simply because that is the reality for us.

This has been going on for decades! My Dad was 100% and he had problems getting his claim approved when I was just a kid. So politicians still get to say this is "tragic today" as if they gave a crap before they got the power to fix it once and for all veterans.

The first official date my husband and I had was going to see The Dark Crystal.


It was a story about good and evil being separated while both sides were trying to take over. In the process, innocents suffered, trapped between the Mystics and the Skeksis.

They existed waiting for a legend to turn into reality for them. Much like veterans have been waiting for the legend of members of Congress to actually do something to fix the VA. Wow what a twisted story this is and how real it is for veterans.

In 82 PTSD was still being called "shell shock" by older veterans. Reading the history of it, it is more in line with what we call traumatic brain injury today. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is different. Development of the PTSD diagnosis

In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) produced the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I), which included "gross stress reaction." This diagnosis was proposed for people who were relatively normal, but had symptoms from traumatic events such as disaster or combat. A problem was that this diagnosis assumed that reactions to trauma would resolve relatively quickly. If symptoms were still present after six months, another diagnosis had to be made.

Despite growing evidence that trauma exposure was associated with psychiatric problems, this diagnosis was eliminated in the second edition of DSM (1968). DSM-II included "adjustment reaction to adult life" which was clearly insufficient to capture a PTSD-like condition. This diagnosis was limited to three examples of trauma: unwanted pregnancy with suicidal thoughts, fear linked to military combat, and Ganser syndrome (marked by incorrect answers to questions) in prisoners who face a death sentence.

In 1980, APA added PTSD to DSM-III, which stemmed from research involving returning Vietnam War Veterans, Holocaust survivors, sexual trauma victims, and others. Links between the trauma of war and post-military civilian life were established.

The trouble is as long as we've known what war can do to those we send, Congress ended up getting off the hook on actually getting the best minds to come up with plans, evidence based programs and the resources to take care of these veterans. Yep, all this time they had to do it, they pretended over and over again, it was something they had no way of seeing or fixing.

Same story with the trouble veterans are caused by the VA while it is still the job of Congress to fund the VA and hold hearings and pass the rules instead of passing the blame. So when does the Great Conjunction happen and the shard hits where it belongs to make us whole again?