veterans Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Ramblin' with Roger

Veterans Treatment Court

Veterans respond favorably to this structured environment given their past experiences in the Armed Forces.

I’ve complained before about the often empty statement “support our troops,” as though sticking a flag decal was actually doing something. Here’s the story of a guy who did.

“The first Veterans Treatment Court was founded by the Honorable Robert Russell in Buffalo, New York in January 2008, after he noticed an increase in the number of veterans appearing on his Drug Court and Mental Health Court dockets. Judge Russell saw firsthand the transformative power of military camaraderie when veterans on his staff assisted a veteran in one of his treatment courts but also recognized that more could be done to ensure veterans were connected to benefits and treatment earned through military service.”

So what is a Veterans Treatment Court? “The Veterans Treatment Court model requires regular court appearances (a bi-weekly minimum in the early phases of the program), as well as mandatory attendance at treatment sessions and frequent and random testing for substance use (drug and/or alcohol). Veterans respond favorably to this structured environment given their past experiences in the Armed Forces. However, a few will struggle and it is exactly those veterans who need a Veterans Treatment Court program the most. Without this structure, these veterans will reoffend and remain in the criminal justice system. The Veterans Treatment Court is able to ensure they meet their obligations to themselves, the court, and their community.”

The concept has gotten some media coverage. I had seen the CBS News story. There are only about 220 Veterans Treatment Courts across the country, with a protocol for setting them up. To participate in VTC Planning Initiative, “each community must identify ten individuals representing the following disciplines to form a Veteran Treatment Court planning team, including Judge, Prosecutor, Defense counsel, Community Treatment provider, Treatment Court Coordinator, Community supervision representative, Law enforcement Evaluator/researcher, Veterans Justice Outreach Coordinator, and Mentor coordinator.”

One can find out more about the VTC program here.

Roz Chast: Cartoon Memoirs at Norman Rockwell Musuem

As spring ended, I told the family that the one thing I really wanted to do during the summer was going to the Norman Rockwell Museum to see the work of cartoonist Roz Chast, having loved her material in the New Yorker magazine for decades. When my friend David Brickman reviewed the show, which had opened on June 6, in July, it just intensified my desire.

Life being what it is, we didn’t make it to the Stockbridge, MA site until October 24, a mere two days before the close of the Chast exhibit, even though it’s only an hour away from Albany, NY. As it turned out, they were having a show outdoors featuring vintage cars; it cost $10 per carload, but the price would apply to going inside the museum, so no big deal.

The linchpin of the Chast portion of the exhibit was her first graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (2014), about her aging parents, “who were in the same fifth-grade class.” There was “her gentle, worrywart father, George” (d. 2007) and “her strong-willed mother, Elizabeth” (d. 2009), educators both, “who subscribed to The New Yorker and inspired” their only child’s “art and world view.” I could have read the whole book right there, on the walls, but I perused enough to know that it’ll be on my Christmas list.

The Daughter preferred some of her other work, such as What I Hate from A to Z, also shown in its entirety. The video about the Brooklyn-born artist was quite entertaining as well.

We’d been to the museum at least twice before, but there were works by Rockwell I had never seen before, notably Glen Canyon Dam; the texture of this painting is lost in the photograph, because, up close, this is a STUNNING piece.

Oddly, a section called Love a Vet: Honoring Our Veterans was already open; the website had given the dates as from November 7, 2015, through January 5, 2016. The playing card format of the works from various artists was very effective.

Finally, I checked out the vehicles outdoors, which were of many makes and models from the 1930s to the 1980s. I’m not a “car guy,” but the 1936 Rolls Royce was, as they say, sweet.

World War I doesn’t get its props

Those partitions after World war I have geopolitical implications to this day.

I was reading about World War I trench poetry remembered in comics anthology, and it hit me how relatively little most Americans know about the first World War (1914-1918), the “War to end all wars,” as someone put it, terribly incorrectly.

And it’s not its remoteness in time (1914-1918). We’re in the midst of the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War (1861-1865), with a pretty fair breakdown of every important battle.

As the article noted: “Of the two, World War II may be the one explored more often in pop culture…” Indeed, Tom Brokaw’s book title, The Greatest Generation, has been adopted as truth about those post-Depression young soldiers from the US going off to war after Pearl Harbor.

…but World War I… was important as well… More than 16 million people were killed, the war began an era of industrialized warfare, and it caused the redrawing of the map of Europe and the Near East.

Those partitions have geopolitical implications to this day.

Read about the Christmas 1914 truce HERE and HERE.

Shooting Parrots wrote about tunnel master John Norton-Griffiths and Alf Price, who punched a 19-year-old Prince Wilhelm in the nose. Also, Charles à Court Repington may have named the war, back in 1920.

Back in June, Jaquandor noted A Century since the Conflagration.

Of course, what’s now known as Veterans Day commemorates the end of World War I. It’s Remembrance Day in other countries and used to be called Armistice Day. Armistice is such a quaint word.

There’s some melancholy song on the first Paul Simon solo album called Armistice Day.

Veterans Day 2013

The better photo ops during the shutdown involved patriotic old men in their 80s and 90s unable to get to war memorials.

Reading this somewhat self-serving history of the Department of Labor during and after World War II: “When the war ended, attention shifted to the needs of those returning from war and their families. The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of June 22, 1944—widely known as the G.I. Bill—provided a weekly unemployment allowance, as well as counseling, placement services, education and job training to nearly 10 million veterans between 1944 and 1949.” Taking care of that generation was important to the country.

At the end or near end, of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we see that
most Americans now believe those conflicts were mistakes. I’m sure battle fatigue was a major factor in people’s opposition to an American incursion into Syria. Yet this is not a reflection of what people felt about soldiers’ bravery, from all reports.

The Veterans Affairs Department is drowning under mountains of paperwork representing services not rendered. During the government shutdown, the VA secretary said that “more than 5 million veterans, as well as some active-duty service members, would not have received “crucial benefits after Nov. 1 if the event had continued much longer. As it was, the shutdown slowed the process of paying those vets.

The better photo ops during the shutdown involved patriotic old men in their 80s and 90s unable to get to war memorials. Yet, one could argue that veterans were hurt far more by the loss of benefits during the shutdown than by the symbolic lack of access to some shrines. Open memorials may matter, but money for essentials matters, too.

Memorial Day, 2013: WWJD

There are no goodies for being right, no satisfaction in “I told you so.”

I’m in my church book study a few months back. We are reading Jesus for President, VERY slowly, for it has much to offer.

Much to my surprise, I get really ticked off, though not at anyone in the room. It was the re-realization that the war in Iraq, indeed many wars, are in stark contrast with Christian ideals. Yet Christianists seemed to have embraced war as some sort of Christo-American manifest destiny.

It surely didn’t help that this was around the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war when I was also reading about:
The lies that predicated the war.
22 veterans per day commit suicide, yet the vets are hamstrung by bureaucracy in getting the aid they need.
Not only did over 4000 American soldiers die in the conflict but over 3,400 contractors also did as well. This hardly ever got reported but was a clever way to diminish how bad the war really was. And that’s just on the US side.
A dying veteran writing on behalf of thousands in an open letter. Sample paragraph: “I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation, and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done.”

And for what? A decade of war that has devastated a nation.

My opposition to this war I have well-documented. I was one of literally millions who, for a moral and substantive reason, rejected the application of U.S. imperial power abroad.

Here’s the problem for me. There are no goodies for being right, no satisfaction in “I told you so.” Former U.N. Ambassador and Congressman Andrew Young was quoted as saying that the United States has “got to have better intelligence and better diplomacy because wars don’t work.”

As we remember our fallen soldiers today, may we be ever vigilant in our efforts to try to keep as many of our warriors alive as possible.
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Interesting job video on the kids.gov site: Prosthetist, who makes artificial arms and legs for individuals who’ve lost their limbs. Nice couple-minute piece.