This newspaper is essentially local in coverage, but the Walter Reed Hospital exposes ought to cause angst and anger in very street in every community in America. Perhaps even more so in this area, which claims to be a bit more educated and aware than others.
I've just listened to the Walter Reed Director weaseling his way through a national talk radio inquiry. One is always amazed and infuriated, once more, by the smarmy arrogance of government "leaders" and their dogged, evasive, unshakable and stupid resistance to doing anything until exposed to scandal. And even then they try to softball it and cover their asses.
Generation after generation, century after century, young impressionable people are sucked into these grand military adventures by the older, calculating, conniving leadership; flattered with parades and cheap, shallow patriotic speech making. The reality sets in for them when many are killed in the most awful ways imaginable. The maimed and handicapped always find themselves having to fight worse battles in the back wards with the minds of industry and government who profit from their losses, and then forget them.
I've read one estimate that it will cost $600 billion to care for the damaged future lives of this latest population victimized by war started by a "gentleman's-C," Yale underachiever and Texas National Guard dropout of a president and his Vietnam-draft dodging vice president. How stupid is this supposedly educated, aware and net-connected populace that it let these people lead it?
And how stupid is this congress, which almost totally voted its support for this murderous, bankrupting idiotic war? Now they are expressing regret, saying they were misled: anything to evade responsibility and anything to retain power. A pox on them all... Hillary, McCain, those in jail and those still outside; the lot of them.
The newspaper accounts of the Walter Reed problems include the plight of a soldier who suffered a head injury from a vehicle mishap. The army declared he deserved no disability awards because, the army claimed, he had been a low achiever in high school. Never mind that the army had accepted him in the first place, and kept him in service for 18 years. So, he and his overwhelmed wife are lost in this inexcusable bureaucratic hell along with all the others our creepy country would rather forget.
Let's remember, this wasn't revealed to us by our "leaders." It came from newspapers. It came from people the "leaders" fear. It came from reporters who weren't chummy with the movers and shakers. It may be that these reporting professions are the only substantial protections populations have from "leaders."
The enormous death and money loss of World War II was followed by several powerful novels whose phrases are still in use. "Catch 22" is still as woefully true for the head-injured soldier today as it was in Joseph Heller's book, which essentially says that if the guy was dumb enough to join he must have been brain damaged already. Only in such messes like the military, and government, can such excesses of indifferent stupidity flourish.
Only public pressure can make them change, and only public re-education and understanding of the awful repetitions - century after century - of these same murderous manipulations of the good intentions can populations confront their self-serving governments and industries.
Unless that happens, the victims of our current, cheesy, self-enriching establishment will - having "survived" Iraq - have to conduct a lifelong, personal "war" against their awful injuries and the forces that caused them. Let this population - guilty of letting Bush into office, twice - re-educate themselves about the repetitious warmongering.
It might happen, if the press retains the power and resolve to rub our noses in it, permanently.
Rainier Beach writer and artist Gordon Anderson may be reached through our newspaper address:
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