\n
Over the last 9 years, I have spent a lot of time volunteering with various veteran organizations, socializing with veteran friends, visiting the VA Hospital with my therapy dogs Liam and Leonidas, as well as teaching a Canine Connections class at that same VA. I have learned a lot about the individuals in the veteran community and at least a little about the veteran experience, but I may have learned even more about civilians: how we view and interact with the veteran community and, in my opinion, how we remain largely disconnected and naive.
\nIt is not the duty of the military and veteran communities to reach out to civilians. It is our job to work to connect with and try to understand the individuals who volunteered to serve in our armed forces and the experiences that contribute to who they are now. That care, time, and effort on our part, is how we help veterans “come home” – that’s how we serve those who served.
\nThe civilian approach to the veteran community often fails at genuine connection because it is built on platitudes that both puts veterans on a pedestal and conveniently keeps them at a distance. This sanitization of veterans and their experience is a kind of defense mechanism to protect us from facing the complexities of war and our accompanying fears. It glosses over things we can’t understand and helps us avoid the things that make us uncomfortable. Our focus on keeping war at an arm’s length keeps us from acknowledging the detrimental affects our distance has on veterans and keeps us from recognizing veterans’ experiences and potential struggles in any meaningful way. So even amidst almost constant public accolades, in reality we find ourselves waffling between ostracizing, idolizing, and fearing combat veterans.
\nWe don’t connect effectively because we are inwardly focused on ourselves and our fears – even if subconsciously. A real change can occur when we become outwardly focused, when we are not as worried about ourselves as we are eager to reach out, empathize, learn, understand, and embrace. As Sebastian Junger describes beautifully in Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, the quality and depth of work a society does in welcoming home its veterans directly affects veterans’ physical and mental health and their ability to reintegrate successfully. I certainly can’t tell anyone how to connect with people, only that it is worth doing genuinely. In my experience, for civilians to connect genuinely with veterans it helps to be mindful of and avoid these 3 specific traps.
\nThe 3 P’s: Pity, Pedestals, and Platitudes
\nPity
\nThis is one of the worst ways we work to force veterans and their experiences into a space that is comfortable for us. We need combat veterans to be pitiable so we can feel better welcoming them back into civil society. What if, *clutches pearls* they didn’t hate war? What if war didn’t break them? Are they normal? Are they safe? Can we trust them? Can we let them back in? Surely any normal person would be broken after an experience like that, so if you’re not broken… We fixate on the idea of the broken, damaged, pitiable war veteran because it lets us avoid any complex confrontation of war and different peoples’ different relationships with it. This is understandable to some degree, in that it is extremely difficult for us civilians to imagine anything like war, so it is difficult for us to understand the people who have been there. We can only draw from our experiences and being damaged by war is likely the easiest thing for many of us to imagine.
\nPedestals
\nPutting veterans on pedestals puts them in a position where they are not allowed to be human. They are not allowed to make mistakes, feel emotions, struggle, or need help because they are under constant pressure to rise to unreasonable expectations. Labels like “hero” set veterans up for failure because a hero is assumed to exist solely for our benefit and without the burden of flaws. Feeling normal and feeling like one belongs is an important part of “coming home” and pedestals keep veterans separate from us. It also sets veterans up for something our society loves: the fall. We love live dramas to play out before our eyes, and veterans on pedestals are prime targets. One person’s struggles can be made heavier by playing out in the public eye and that can make it harder for the whole community of veterans that civilians tend to paint with a monolithic, broad brush.
\nPlatitudes
\nBoy, do we love some camo stuff: American flag themed everything, yellow ribbon magnets, half time shenanigans, Heinz Warrior Ketchup, Salute to Service – there is certainly no shortage of opportunities for us civilians to be patriotic, and be seen being patriotic. The volume of our “patriotism” frees us from the hard work of really supporting the communities and individuals for which we have a great responsibility. “Thank you for your service” (book and movie links) is one thing, but so is reaching out to the local veteran groups in your community, from old timers to college students.
\nYour local VA has volunteer opportunities including social visits and events, music groups, animal therapy, and for the special people who can do it, hospice volunteers who do hard work to make sure no veteran dies alone. And outside of organized volunteering, you can patronize veteran businesses, hire veteran employees, support your employees who are still in the reserves, help the families of deployed service members, or help with the pets of deployed service members. We have been at war for a generation, and we are losing the last of our Greatest one. Have a meal, have a drink, share a story, listen, hug, laugh, listen, listen, listen. It is worth a thousand magnets. At least.
\n',protected:!1},excerpt:{rendered:'Over the last 9 years, I have spent a lot of time volunteering with various veteran organizations, socializing with veteran friends, visiting the VA Hospital with my therapy dogs Liam and Leonidas, as well as teaching a Canine Connections class at that same VA. I have learned a lot about the individuals in the veteran … Continue reading The 3 P’s: A Note to My Fellow Civilians, Veterans Day 2018
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\nJune 12th was the 50 year anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia decision that struck down state bans on interracial marriage. We have often addressed the ways the human-canine bond can be a lens for us to examine social issues we face, and specifically, how we think about breed, and the systems we have in place to determine breed, are rooted in our racist eugenic past.
\nThis article from the New Yorker tells a thread of a story from the tapestry of the Loving case. William Marutani was the General Counsel for the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) who submitted an amicus brief to the court on behalf of the Lovings. When the case came before the court, Marutani was afforded a rare opportunity to present oral arguments along with the Lovings’ attorneys.
\n“While Cohen and Hirschkop’s arguments in the case largely centered on legal doctrine like equal protection and due process,” Marutani raised two separate and unique concerns:
\n1) “[T]he concept of whiteness as defined under Virginia law, which barred white residents from marrying anyone who had any ‘trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.’”
\n2) “[T]he fact that the state prohibited only white people from marrying outside their race, thus allowing all other races to intermarry, exposed the ban ‘for exactly what it is—it is a white-supremacy law.’”
\nOf the arguments Marutani presented for each of the above issues, it was this part about the first point that stood out (emphasis added):
\n“Given Europe’s history of ‘invasions, cross-invasions, population shifts with the inevitable cross-breeding which follows,’ as well as the melting-pot nature of America, most white people in Virginia would struggle to prove their racial purity, he said. Virginia’s law, he added, left the interpretation of these racial designations up to laymen, like the county clerks who granted marriage licenses.”
\nSound familiar? Given the many philosophies and methods used to determine breed that are rooted in our racist past, here is another example: A government employee charged with making an arbitrary decision about genetic composition based on physical appearance – an obvious forerunner for administrative breed determination. The other interesting detail is that he refers to them as “laymen.” That is because you can’t be an expert in something that doesn’t exist. Racial eugenics was finally exposed to be the fraud that it was. And slowly, “laymen” are learning what the canine expert community has known for a long time – looking at a dog to determine its genetic make-up is…uh…dubious. At best.
\nHere is some audio about the story from PRI’s “The World”:
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