Paula J. Caplan's Blog

First published at http://www.paulajcaplan.net/blog May 1, 2018

I hope that thoughtful people will read this essay and consider how different experiences and different perspectives bear on the sequence of events I shall describe.

I am not a military veteran, but my late father was, and I have spent more than a dozen years listening to veterans from all eras, advocating for them and their families, making films about them, and making a Public Service Announcement series called "Listen to a Veteran!" These experiences have taught me much about the too-frequent chasms between veterans and nonveterans, and it means a great deal to me to try to bridge those chasms. You can only begin to imagine, I suspect, how troubled -- no, devastated -- I was by a series of recent events involving veterans from America's war in Vietnam, a war whose legacy has been tremendous conflict among Americans, confusion, pain, and moral anguish. 

The events about which this essay is written began when I read an article in Smithsonian Magazine and wrote a letter to its editor in response. The article was called "The Ghosts of My Lai" and included the statement that Vietnam veterans were called baby killers. First I shall tell you the content of my letter to the editor as it was published in the March 2018 hard copy edition of the magazine. It was:

Contrary to your suggestion, Vietnam veterans returning from the war were not called "baby killers," according to scholars who have reviewed news media reports and other sources from that time. In fact, government officials, trying to garner support and shift the public focus away from the war's realities, promoted the myth that antiwar protestors aimed that epithet at veterans. It was LBJ who was called a baby killer.  The letter was signed Paula J. Caplan, founder, Listen to a Veteran, Rockville, Maryland.

After my letter was published, about a dozen veterans wrote to me, I replied to each one individually and privately, and then on March 13, 2018, I wrote this letter to them collectively:

Hello,

This letter is going (Bcc'd) to the veterans who contacted me to express concern about the extremely shortened version of my letter that Smithsonian Magazine's editors chose to publish.

I am grateful to each of you for taking the time and trouble to write to me and to describe what were painful experiences you had that contradicted what seemed to appear in my letter. Being an advocate for veterans from all eras for more than a decade, the last thing I ever want to do is cause further suffering to any veteran.
I am currently dealing with major medical problems in a close family member -- and am deeply touched by the very kind, compassionate responses that two of you sent to that statement -- so have limited time, but I have been in communication with the magazine's editor about how to rectify the consequences of their restricting my letter to 50 words while publishing three other letters, two of which were 2 1/2 times longer than that. Especially with regard to a matter as complex as what I was wanting to convey, this was unforgivable, and the combination of their singular restriction placed on me with the wording I ultimately chose has seemingly led to their Managing Editor's acknowledgement of their wrong.

The editor refuses to publish a longer letter from me in the hard copy of the magazine, which is what I requested, and only agreed to (1)remove the current letter from their online version and (2)publish a longer letter from ... but only online... once I have the time and space to write it. However, it is unfortunate that -- though the editor says she has no idea how many people read the magazine in hard copy vs. how many read the online version -- she admits that it is likely that far fewer people look at it online than in hard copy.

Nevertheless, I will be writing that longer letter for the online version.

In the meantime, I wanted to send you this link to an essay I wrote some time ago on the website I have for my work with veterans, in case you'd like to have a look at the alarm I have felt about the invisibility of veterans' suffering. I realize this may seem ironic to you, in light of the reason you contacted me, but I hope you might have a look at it.

https://whenjohnnyandjanecomemarching.weebly.com/blog [the link took them to my essay called "The Naked Emperor and the Vanishing Veteran," which is also published at paulajcaplan.net on the blog page]

I will be in touch when I have written the longer letter for the magazine's website.

Warm wishes,

Paula
Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D. 
Founder and Director, Listen to a Veteran! listentoaveteran.org
"Is Anybody Listening?" film isanybodylisteningmovie.org
"Is Anybody Listening?" song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztJ5c...


Subsequently, I received a few letters from more veterans. I then wrote as follows on March 23 to all of the veterans who had contacted me:

Hello,

This message is going to you wonderful veterans who wrote to me about my extremely brief letter in the hard copy of Smithsonian Magazine.

It took me awhile to write a more extensive letter, because there was a lot I wanted to say, and I was so grateful for what each of you wrote to me and wanted time to mull over the various pieces of the matter, but the longer letter was published online today at 
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/magazine/mar18_discussion-180968085/?no-cache

I hope you will see right away my report of your messages to me and my belief in what you told me, as well as my gratitude for how gracious you were.

I hope you will also understand more of why I wanted to respond to that initial statement in the My Lai article. And of course, if you would like to write anything to me about the new letter, I would be very interested to hear from you.

Warmest wishes,

Paula
Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D.
Associate, Hutchins Center, Harvard University
paulajcaplan.net
&
Founder and Director, Listen to a Veteran! listentoaveteran.org
Producer, "Is Anybody Listening?" film isanybodylisteningmovie.org
"Is Anybody Listening?" song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztJ5c...
Producer, "Isaac Pope: The Spirit of an American Century" (film scheduled for completion in the next couple of months) isaacpopefilm.com

I hope that readers of this essay will be sure to read my longer letter in Smithsonian Magazine online at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/magazine/mar18_discussion-180968085/?no-cache and send me your thoughts if you wish.

Originally published November 10, 2015, at "The Naked Emperor and the Vanishing Veteran" is my first blog post on my Authors Guild website. You can read it at http://www.paulajcaplan.net/blog.htm

Whispers -- from the red carpet to charitable foundations to the corporate boardroom -- tell a very different story than do prominent speakers and private citizens who declare, "We support veterans! We hire veterans! We love veterans...and their families!"

In the belly of the Pentagon in December, 2011, I first met Army Colonel David Sutherland, who had led a brigade during the surge in Iraq and straightforwardly told a Washington Post reporter that when more than 100 of his soldiers were killed, "I didn't like it." Knowing I had just written a book about veterans and organized a Harvard Kennedy School conference about veterans and their families, the Colonel asked if I had read the two Pentagon white papers called "The Sea of Goodwill" and "The Groundswell of Support." I had. He asked what I thought of them. Unaware that he had written them, I said with no preliminaries that I thought they were good as far as they went, that I agreed that all veterans deserve an education, employment, and health care. "However," I continued, "you can educate veterans and give them jobs and health care, but if they are isolated from their home communities, many will abuse alcohol and drugs, become homeless, and kill themselves." 

I then said that I thought that the notion that there are a sea of goodwill and groundswell of support for veterans from nonveterans was lovely but largely untrue. In researching for my book, I had found few nonveterans who even wanted to think about veterans. After all, who wants to think about war? What's more, these days, veterans comprise less than 7% of the United States population, so when the small numbers combine with the social isolation of so many, the vast majority of citizens may not even know someone who served. If you don't interact -- or knowingly interact -- much with veterans, you simply don't have to think about them. I hoped against hope that I would be proven wrong about this.

Starting in the spring of 2011, I had begun blogging for Psychology Today, and in the next few years, I learned that nearly every time I wrote anything about veterans, between 30% and less than 1% as many people read those essays as read anything else I ever wrote about there. I was devastated to see the lack of support so starkly displayed in those numbers. I tried an experiment: The next time I wrote an essay about veterans, instead of telegraphing that in the headline, I called it "Healing Without Harming," and within three days it had garnered as many readers as my average essay that was unrelated to veterans.  

After working with veterans and their families for more than a dozen years, I have had lengthy conversations with many people who deeply care about veterans and genuinely help through various organizations and services. At first, all of us were optimistic that once we made clear that many veterans and their families suffer because of the former's military experiences, that they suffer more when their deeply human responses are wrongly labeled signs of mental illness and this leads their communities to fear and turn away from them, and that there are many alternative approaches that help them truly come home, America would rise to the occasion and help. But through these years, I hear increasingly hear from these people that their optimism has gone. The Groundswell of Support is an emperor with no clothes. 

Whispers from people on awards show red carpets go like this: "In the past couple of years, fewer celebrities even mention servicemembers, and with rare exceptions, the messages from those who do are far briefer than before." Why? Many celebrities believe that because the most recent wars are said to be over, veterans no longer need our attention. They have become invisible.

Help for veterans no longer appears on the lists of many charitable foundations that a few years ago listed it as a top priority for funding. A highly-placed expert on the military reports that CEOs that had formerly proudly trumpeted their intentions to employ veterans through such programs as Joining Forces that is supported by First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden now tell him there is no need to help them, because "the wars are over."

These attitudes reflect a staggering ignorance of history. In an important sense, wars rarely completely end. The production of new veterans certainly never stops. Not only do thousands of servicemembers continue to serve in regions where we were recently explicitly at war, but also, 70 years after World War II ended, we have nearly 50,000 military personnel stationed in Germany, more than that in Japan, and 28,500 service members in Korea, all these decades after those wars ended. And now President Obama announces that he will send "50 Special Forces" troops to Syria, but history shows that what starts with a tiny number quickly swells. There will be more deaths, more horrific physical injuries, more emotional devastation.

The suicide rate among veterans is highest among the oldest, those from World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Consider that fact in light of how long they have been home, and the low tide of the Sea of Goodwill should scare us to death. The fact that their wars officially ended decades ago has not wiped out their need for connection and other kinds of help. Related to this, another frightening fact has only recently begun to be whispered about: It is that the well-known claim that "22 veterans kill themselves every day" is a vast underestimate. That figure is based on reports from only 21 states, not including California and Texas with their high numbers of veterans. In spite of this, respected organizations and individuals continue to bruit about the figure of 22, when a very conservative estimate would place it at least at 50.

Suicide rates are also especially high among women veterans, and likely this is at least partly connected to the high likelihood of being sexually assaulted in the military if you are a woman. Many women and men who were sexually victimized have courageously told their stories in Congressional hearings, only to plunge into despair as year after year, no legislation has been passed that has significantly reduced the incidence of such assaults or increased the numbers of meaningful punishments for the perpetrators. They feel invisible.

Another ugly realm that has been too little revealed -- and largely unpunished -- has been the number of entities purported to help veterans who are in it too much in order, as what one called in an email sent to (but not intended for) me, to "get those veteran dollars." As I travel around the U.S., the organization I hear touted the most by ordinary citizens when asked who is helping veterans is Wounded Warrior Project, which is certainly the most highly publicized. The Wounded Warriors CEO and employees receive alarmingly high percentages of the WW budget -- the CEO's salary going well over $300,000 -- and the project ended up with more than $90 million in assets at the end of 2012, during which time they spent $300,000 for a parade and $50,000 for a monument, all of which could instead have gone to provide substantive help for veterans and their families. Their website includes the claim that they supported 398 veterans and their caregivers and placed 320 wounded veterans in jobs, not impressive figures for a charity that in 2013 took in close to $235 in revenue and in 2014, more than $340 million. (http://www.charitynavigator.org/index...) And despite refusing to provide any help to veterans who served before 9/11, Trace Adkins in one of their Public Service Announcements (read: commercial) sings a verse about a man who served in Vietnam. Vietnam veterans who were turned away from Wounded Warriors have told me they were crushed by the rejection and felt invisible. 

In stark contrast are sterling entities that genuinely help veterans, including but by no means limited to Col. (Ret.) Sutherland's Dixon Center in Easter Seals, Vietnam veteran Shad Meshad's National Veterans Foundation, the Clowning Project for veterans that is run by Drs. Patch Adams and George Patrin, and Dr. Mary Vieten's Tohidu retreats. They and their staff members work tirelessly, without glitz and glamour, to give veterans and their families what they need. But the combination of the hush-hush tide that is covering up those needs threatens to become a tidal wave that conceals what we as a nation ignore at our peril.

​©Copyright 2015 by Paula J. Caplan                                                                      All rights reserved

Every 4th of July I remember that at a fireworks display when I was already middle-aged, my father, Jerome A. Caplan -- a World War II veteran -- once said quietly, "This smells like a battlefield." The way he said it gave no clue to how that felt for him, and I did not ask. One reason I did not ask was that I had long known both that fireworks are made from gunpowder and that my father had been an Army Captain in the artillery, but I had never connected the two pieces of information together, so I was registering that connection in my head. Another reason I did not ask was that her never asked for anything for himself and never wanted anyone to worry about him, so the absence of audible anguish in his voice and of visible pain on his face did not prompt me to inquire further.  And I came to understand only late in life that I had rarely asked my beloved father, who was a wonderful storyteller, about his war experiences, because I could not bear to think of him in danger.

Suddenly this year, there have been lengthy segments in broadcast media about how shattering it can be for servicemembers and veterans to hear and smell fireworks. Were such segments common in previous years, but I tuned them out, too? Or is our country coming to recognize a little about what it is like to be in a war zone and how it can stay with you? A cynical view would be that media people were casting about for a new angle and happened to come up with this.

As the Fourth of July was approaching this year, I happened to be near Long Beach, California, where the massive ship the Queen Mary has been located for decades. The Queen Mary is the ship that carried my late father and massive numbers of other soldiers back to the United States at the ends of their times serving in World War II. The tour guide said last Thursday that the ship had no stabilizers, and that reminded me that my father had mentioned being terribly seasick on the voyage. The vessel that in peacetime carried 2,000 passengers and 1,200 crew in wartime carried 16,000 people.

Sgt. Isaac Pope was my father's 1st Sergeant during The Battle of the Bulge. Their unit was composed of four white officers, and the rest were Black, most but not all of them from the Deep South. My father always used to point to a picture of some of his men and say, "That is Sgt. Pope. He was the sweetest guy you'd ever want to meet. He had had very little education, but in the Army he worked so hard and learned so fast that he was quickly promoted to 1st Sergeant." Now 97 years old, this wise, compassionate, fascinating man was born in Kinston, NC, and lives there now in the North Carolina State Veterans Home. I had the great honor and joy to meet him after my father died nearly six years ago.

Joseph Friedman, a fabulous professional cameraman went with me to Kinston last year and filmed 4 1/2 hours of Sgt. Pope telling about his life. We had gone there specifically to hear about his experiences during the War for the film "Is Anybody Listening?" (you can see Sgt. Pope in the trailer at isanybodylisteningmovie.org) but heard much more. He described growing up as the youngest of many children and at the age of 6 picking cotton in the boiling North Carolina sun with his parents. He took us up to and through the war years and his experiences returning to Kinston, marrying, and trying to get a decent job. He talked about his work with the local chapter of the NAACP and his courage (my word, not his) in openly advocating for unionizing the DuPont factory where he worked as a janitor. He related that my father and Gene Jones -- a biracial man in their unit who was from Philadelphia -- learned that many of the men from the south had not been allowed to vote, and they vowed that this must change. He said that they wrote to General Eisenhower and said we cannot expect them to risk their lives for their country when they have been denied the right to vote. Before they shipped out, they were granted that right.

Sgt. Pope returned on the Queen Mary after WWII, and on that long voyage, he said, the servicemembers had ample time to talk with each other about their experiences at war and their hopes and plans for the future. This kind of opportunity needs to be built in for servicemembers returning today from combat zones or even just from the military life that is vastly different from the civilian world.

Sgt. Pope told me that as the Queen Mary approached the harbor at the end of their trip, a white sergeant ordered, "All of you heading north, get on this side. All of you heading south, get on this other side." Sgt. Pope was heading south, and as he and the others going that way filed past, that sergeant warned them in a menacing tone, "Don't you go thinking that anything has changed!" Sgt. Pope has seen the racism continue in too many ways throughout this country since that time.

As we celebrate the independence of our nation this weekend, may we consider how integral to the winning of that independence was the determination to ensure liberty and freedom from oppression for its citizens. Although the wealthy, white, male founders of this country failed to prohibit oppression on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, and age when they proclaimed the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there have been some strides toward reduction of oppression, but there is such a tragically great distance still to go that it is unconscionable to do less than demand speedy progress toward the guaranteeing of such rights for all. 

©Copyright 2015 by Paula J. Caplan                                                                  All rights reserved
 

By Paula J. Caplan

War trauma. Rape trauma. Trauma from other kinds of violence, poverty, oppression. Trauma from automobile, train, bus, and airplane accidents. Trauma from natural disasters.

In some cultures, the community considers itself responsible for helping traumatized people deal with the trauma, reconnect with the community, and find meaning and delight in their lives. In too many cultures, we ship traumatized people off, telling them that their anguish is mental illness and to talk to therapists -- and please close door behind you, so we don't have to hear about it -- and take their drugs. 

As I wrote years ago in "The Astonishing Power of Listening" -- https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/... -- a beautifully simple, nontechnical act that requires no training and no degrees is respectful, silent listening. When done with 100% of one's attention and one's whole heart, it has been shown by research we did at Harvard Kennedy School and since then to be helpful, often powerfully moving, and effective in reducing emotional suffering and heading toward a better future.

Starting June 10, every three days up to the Fourth of July, a Public Service Announcement with the message "Listen to a Veteran!" will be rolled out on Facebook (When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home page) and Twitter (Paula J Caplan).

The "Thank a veteran for their service" campaign took off like wildfire, with nonveterans in the U.S. -- who make up 93% of the population -- jumping on board, feeling like now they knew what they needed to do, and rushing up to veterans in airports and on sidewalks, saying, "Thank you for your service!" Some veterans tell me they appreciate that statement. Others tell me they actively dislike it, because, in the words of one, "It's like a hit-and-run. They race up, say their thanks, and race away. They feel they've done their bit, and that's the end of it. They don't know what I have experienced, and they don't indicate that they want to know." Still others have told me, heartbreakingly, "If they knew what I had done, they wouldn't thank me."

We need to go beyond "Thank you for your service." We need to stop believing the myth that all veterans are mentally ill and that therefore only therapists can help...and that therefore there is nothing anyone else can do, so they can just turn away.

It is an important civic responsibility, whatever the veteran's politics and whatever the nonveteran's politics, for every nonveteran just to listen to a veteran -- in Veterans Homes, other nursing homes, hospice facilities, on campuses, in social and community and faith-based settings. Ninety-three percent of Americans are military-illiterate, having never served. And even more of us are war-illiterate. As citizens, when we decide whether to support or oppose the next war and the next and the next, we need to know viscerally what that means, and the most valuable way to learn is by listening to a veteran. Nonveterans who have done a listening session tell us -- listen2veterans.org -- that the listening has transformed their lives for the better, creating an important connection with a veteran, destroying the negative stereotypes they believed about veterans, and in hearing how the veteran confronted matters of life and death and moral anguish, learned about the veteran's humanity and about their own.

©Copyright 2015 by Paula J. Caplan                                           All rights reserved

Published March 5, 2015 at https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-isnt-golden/201503/diagnosisgate-major-mental-health-system-expos


Massive Conflict of Interest and Data Distortion Little Known 

"Diagnosisgate" — It is probably the most stunning story of corruption in the history of the modern mental-health system. Mysteriously, it has been kept out of major media for two decades.

In recent years, the man who has been called the world's most important psychiatrist has painted himself as the white knight who warns the public about the dangers of Big Pharma and psychiatric diagnosis. But Allen Frances, the longest-running head of psychiatry's "bible," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — which earned more than $100 million under his reign — actually worked hand-in-glove with a major drug company to misrepresent research on a massive scale in order to market misleadingly one of their most dangerous drugs, Risperdal.

Nearly a year ago, my attention was drawn to a blockbuster of a document that revealed these distortions of science and the whopping conflicts of interest. It was essential to inform the public, because it is the mental health system's Watergate and has led to enormous harm. One editor after another of both general publications and scholarly journals fled from publishing the story. This surprised me, given the story's importance and the fact that it was almost completely unknown to the public and professionals.

The brave Dr. David Holmes, editor of the journal APORIA, based at the University of Ottawa, has just published the article, which is at http://www.oa.uottawa.ca/journals/aporia/articles/2015_01/commentary.pdf

This sequence of events tragically affects vast numbers of people ... two enormous groups are military servicemembers and veterans (though by no means only them). Have a look at this quotation from http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2012/04/broken-warriors-test/55389/ (link is external) :

With Veterans Day coming up on Tuesday, a woman veteran posted on Facebook a heartfelt plea that nonveterans stop acting as though this is Memorial Day and focus on the help and support that living veterans need and deserve. I second that with all my heart.

The point of today's essay is to provide a huge array of ways that any nonveteran can be of help. If you have the impression that the United States is filled with more help for veterans than they can possibly use, you are wrong. There is a lot of flagwaving, and many organizations claim to help veterans but do very little. Most important is a sad state of affairs reflected on my Psychology Today blog. In the three years of my writing essays there, I have posted maybe 150 or so, about 20 of which are related in various ways to veterans, and the rest of which are about a huge range of subjects, from personal stories to Supreme Court decisions to matters of human suffering and women's issues. With one exception, any time I have posted an essay about anything related to veterans, it has received between 30% and only 3% the number of readers of any other subject about which I have written. When I saw these dismal statistics, showing nonveterans aversion even to reading about veterans, I tried a little experiment. The next essay I wrote about veterans, I took care not to reveal in the headline whom it was about, calling it "Healing Without Harming." Within a couple of days, that essay got as many readers as when I write about someone other than veterans.

I have learned that some nonveterans find it easier to think about veterans who have died, because they do not confront the dilemma of what they can do...or if there is anything they need to do. So often, because of the pernicious myth that being devastated by war or by having been sexually assaulted in the military means one is mentally ill, nonveterans say to me, "I know veterans could use some help, but they're mentally ill, and I am not a therapist, so there's nothing I can do." Nothing could be further from the truth. So what can each of us do? Any or all of the following:

(1) STOP saying that traumatized veterans (or even traumatized nonveterans) have mental illnesses. Since the widely-used term "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" is simply a way of taking the deeply human reactions to trauma and instead classifying them as an official mental illness (PTSD resides in the manuals of psychiatric disorders), it is more accurate and far better to describe what happened, what the trauma was, and what the feelings and thoughts are that understandably resulted from the trauma. We learn this by listening to what the traumatized person tells us. And we refuse to add to their burden by calling them mentally ill, so instead of saying they have "PTSD," we say "They went through the hell of war" or "They were devastated when their sergeant raped them and escaped punishment, while the victim was accused of being mentally ill, a troublemaker, and not worthy to continue serve in the military." "PTSD" gives the impression that there is something different, weird, sick about the labeled person's reactions to the horror they have lived through. Let us refuse to participate in that way of causing harm.

(2) Realize that researchers have found that servicemembers and veterans are less likely to go to therapists than are people who have not served in the military and that the hordes of new therapists and tons of psychiatric drugs the military and Veterans Affairs have brought into their systems have failed to reduce the rates of veterans' suicides, homelessness, substance abuse, and family breakdown...and what this makes clear is that even if every one of those therapists is terrific and compassionate, and even if (we know this is untrue) every psychotropic pill was helpful and not at all harmful, at the very least, more is needed. The MORE comes in a huge array of alternative approaches that have been proven to be helpful and healing. At our "A Better Welcome Home" conference at Harvard Kennedy School, we made 28 five-minute videos of people from the Department of Defense, the Seattle VA, and throughout the private and volunteer sectors, each one describing a different alternative approach. You can see these videos at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=...   They range from physical exercise to meditation to working in the arts or doing volunteer work to having a service animal to finding an advocate for legal challenges. Every nonveteran can right this minute go to that site, click on three or four of the brief videos that are about subjects you personally love, and choose one of those ways to help. Attached to each video is the contact information for the person in that video, whom you are urged to get in touch with, and a list of several different ways that you can help with that approach.

(3) Make a commitment to simply taking a couple of hours to listen silent but with your whole heart to a veteran from any era. This is what my Welcome Johnny and Jane Home Project consists of, and you can read more about it at listen2veterans.org and can sign up right there to be a listener. Early research at Harvard Kennedy School and ongoing research reveals that veterans find the sessions to be helpful, even healing, and sometimes utterly life-transforming, and nonveteran listeners invariably report that it is positively transformative for them.

(4) Take two minutes to help make "Listen to a veteran" an idea planted in the hearts and mind of all Americans, so that each will think of this as their civic duty, by ordering a "Listen to a Veteran" t-shirt or bumper sticker at gofundme.com/listen2veterans

©Copyright 2014 by Paula J. Caplan                           All rights reserved
 

Everywhere I go, I hear how demoralized people are by all the bad news they hear, so I write today because I have good news, encouraging news, reason for hope. I have witnessed firsthand a model for making a better world. And witnessing it has been invigorating, so I want to share this with you. It is about a particular person and a tiny slice of a set of larger issues in which you might or might not be interested, but I hope you will see the pattern that will give you reason to be more optimistic than you might be at the moment.

Are you, like most Americans, tuning out all politicians because you assume that they are all talk and no action, that their motives are purely political and self-serving rather than based on a genuine passion to serve those in need? If so, like you, I had come perilously close to tuning people out solely because they are elected officials. In spite of my longstanding cynicism about politicians, a tiny crack began to open in the armor of my skepticism two years ago, when Congressman Raul Ruiz defeated Mary Bono Mack and became California’s 36th District’s member of the United States House of Representatives.

Even then, I had the jaded thought, “It’s easy for a politician to say the right things in order to get elected. But I hear that the hardest election campaign for a victor is the second one, because opposing forces might not have expected that first victory and have two years to get mobilized for the race for the House seat two years later. So I’m sure this guy will go back on his campaign promises, will show himself to be more worried about being re-elected than about serving his constituents and Americans in general.”

Congressman Ruiz invited me to serve on his Veterans Advisory Board, and I accepted. When I told a highly respected veteran of whom I have a great opinion that this legislator has such a Board, he said cynically, “Oh, Paula, they all do.” So I thought maybe the creation of that Board was just for show.

My skepticism on all counts was unjustified, and I write this in the hope of restoring readers’ faith in the American system, because it turns out that it can work when elected officials maintain their integrity and their passion to serve.

It would take pages and pages to recount all that Congressman Ruiz and his terrific staff have done for his constituents during his short time in office, but I will focus here primarily on the October 15, 2014, meeting he convened and what led up to it. I have learned – and have data to prove – that most Americans do not want to think about veterans, but I ask that you read the rest of this essay even if you are not a veteran, because you will see that what he did at that meeting is a model of what we long for politicians to do.

Soon after the recent VA scandals hit the headlines, I had attended a meeting of the Congressman’s Veterans Advisory Board and was delighted to hear him say that his first priority was how to get veterans’ healthcare needs met in a timely way. He has a terrific analytical mind, and you could see that his years of experience as an Emergency Room physician, his Harvard Kennedy School degree in public policy, and his Harvard degree in public health combined to steer him away from unproductively just laying blame and instead focused him on how to help those in need…and how to do it fast. Doing the latter of course included identifying the policies and individuals that had led to the disastrous problems, including unnecessary deaths, that had just been revealed at the Phoenix, AZ, facility, but by the time of our meeting, Dr. Ruiz had taken immediate action: He had contacted the member of the House of Representatives whose district includes Phoenix and had offered to come and bring other doctors and professionals to Phoenix to provide care right away. This is what he did when he went to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, and his action-oriented approach is also seen in his annual gathering of professionals to provide free healthcare to uninsured or underinsured residents of the very low-income area of Coachella Valley, CA, where he grew up.

The faith-restoring purpose of the later meeting on October 15 was clearly-defined as getting immediate help to those who need it in his own district. Congressman Ruiz says the goal is providing “veteran-based care,” and it is poignant that at this stage, it cannot just be called “care” but that the term “veteran-based” must be added as a reminder that what matters is to get a rigid, bureaucratic system refocused on its reason for existing.

Working with Loma Linda VA staff, Congressman Ruiz had learned that they were working to improve their services, but he knew that many veterans in his district needed to receive care sooner than the Loma Linda VA could manage or that traveling the considerable distance from their homes to Loma Linda was a serious hardship. So be brought to that October meeting officials from Loma Linda, from the Riverside County Medical Society, and Tri-West Healthcare Alliance Corporation – an insurance collaborative providing coverage for veterans to be treated by practitioners who are not in the VA system. Also attending were individual practitioners from the district who wanted to provide services to veterans right near where they live.

Here is what was a joy to watch: Congressman Ruiz made a brief introductory speech but never mentioned the upcoming election and did not blow his own horn. He had arranged for others to speak as well. And boy, can he run a meeting! He has a laser-like focus on making sure that people’s problems are solved. He has a gift for making sure that as many people as possible are heard and for keeping people on point, gracefully and respectfully intervening in angry outbursts and expressions of frustration to bring the focus on getting those who can provide help to commit then and there to doing so with great specificity. This paves the way for them to be held accountable if they do not. Just one of many examples: Non-VA health practitioners from the Palm Springs area who were fed up being put on hold when they call the Loma Linda VA or who had tried repeatedly to get the name and phone number of the person who could give them crucial information were understandably upset, and Congressman Ruiz swiftly made sure that the VA representative provided that information.

The Congressman not only made sure that some problems were solved immediately but also – as is his regular practice – asked the audience what solutions they proposed. This is part of a healthy community organizing approach, and it leads to effective problem-solving, because everyone feels listened to and valued, and when solutions are communally created, they are simply more likely to work.

He also asks, “Was this helpful?” This is especially important in light of the way that elected officials often become insulated from the real world and of the many constituents who, feeling awe or shyness in the presence of such officials, are reluctant to say, “Actually, no. My question was not really answered” or “My problem has not been solved.”

And he ends meetings by asking, “What are the next steps?” and again focusing on concrete and specific plans for what can be done.

Congressman Ruiz sits on the House VA Committee and is in direct communication with the national VA leadership, which is looking at his approach as a potential model for VA facilities throughout the country to provide for veterans. Ruiz is a Democrat, but what he does could be done by people in any political party or indeed in any organization. Finding feasible ways to meet the needs of anyone who is underserved or poorly served does not need to be partisan and should be based not on power but on service. What I saw at that meeting is a model that should be replicated across the land.

©2014 by Paula J. Caplan                                                                                        All rights reserved

©Copyright 2014 by Paula J. Caplan                                                 All rights reserved

As my toes froze on the South Lawn of the White House February 11,* I had no idea how the imminent appearances of President Barack Obama and French Président Francois Hollande would affect me...then and over months to come. My rapidly numbing feet nearly impelled me to flee on them, as fast as their numbness would allow, but I am glad I ignored them enough to remain.

Yes, it was interesting and moving to experience the ceremony with the music and the sense of community that can envelop a mob of strangers when we assemble to focus on a single thing. I have experienced that in theatre audiences, in political rallies and marches, in classrooms, and now I was experiencing it among a group assembled to hear what two major heads of state would say in a place so filled with history.

I spend a lot of time questioning and criticizing some of the things that our government and other governments do, but what stopped my heart that day was the simple statement by President Hollande that "each of our countries knows what it owes to the other -- its freedom." **  The details to which he referred were that General Lafayette -- whose full name was the fabulous Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, Marquis de La Fayette -- sailed from France to serve under General George Washington, helping the American colonies win their freedom from Great Britain and become the United States of America, and then nearly 170 years later, U.S. forces landed at Normandy on June 6, 1944, to begin to liberate France from four years of Nazi occupation.

I was deeply moved because the ideals of true freedom, true equality, and true respect for humankind are always affecting, however we might grieve the failures of governments, organizations, corporations, and individuals to live up to them.

I was also moved -- to the point that temporarily I could not physically move -- because my late father, Jerome A. Caplan, and two of the men I know who served with him, Isaac Pope of Kinston, N.C., and Charles Johnson of Oakland, CA, landed at Normandy on July 9, 1944, in the long continuation of that invasion, and at the moment of hearing the words of Président Hollande, I knew that I must go to Normandy this summer.

When I wrote When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home,*** I said that few Americans want to think about veterans, in part because thinking about veterans means thinking about war. I knew avoid such avoidance firsthand, because despite adoring my father and despite the fact that he was a terrific storyteller, I had never been able to retain in memory the stories he told yearly about his time in the military and especially at the Battle of the Bulge, where he and his soldiers were completely surrounded by the Nazis as the snow fell hard and almost horizontally. I realized only recently that what caused my memory problems was that it was unbearable to know that my beloved father had been in such danger ... even though he himself never spoke of any danger to him, just about the wonderful men with whom he served and some of the other realities of war. So last month, when I arrived in Normandy, my first inclination -- when I studied brochures showing how to get from Honfleur, where I was staying, to Utah Beach, where my father and his men landed, I noticed that halfway between, in the city of Caen, there is a memorial museum about the war  -- was not to go to Caen. That may seem strange in light of why I had come to Normandy, but it reflects my deep aversion to thinking about war.

I overcame my reluctance to go to the Caen museum and will always be glad that I did. It is one thing to be thousands of miles from the battle zones and read about what happened; it is quite another to travel through a museum in Normandy and to see pictures and videos of what occurred right there. In some way that I had barely registered before, the fact that the French people lived for four years -- four years -- under Nazi occupation and that hundreds of thousands had fled the Nazi encroachment and become refugees, sleeping in barns, within their own country ... all of this became real, and the heaviness of the reality was palpable.

Driving toward Utah Beach almost two weeks ago in a rental car, I could hardly bear the beauty of the countryside -- the green farmlands filled with cattle and growing crops, the smell and then the sight of the ocean -- because all that beauty makes unimaginable the carnage happened there. I had the same feeling decades ago when I took my then teenaged children to Bastogne, Belgium, where the Battle of the Bulge was fought.

Getting out of the car at Utah Beach, I glanced at the beach itself on my left but first went to the important museum there, the most powerful element of which is a video filled with interviews of people from the surrounding area who lived through that time. Happily, the video, called "Utah Beach: Victory in the Sand," is available in English and French. In the trailer of it at http://www.cine.org/film/utah-beach-victory-in-the-sand/ you see portions about the landing itself but no clips of the stunning interviews with the citizens who lived nearby and who are in fact seen in the video.

Then I walked across the sand and down toward the water. I hadn't know what I would feel or think. What came to mind was this: I remembered my father saying that it felt important to be in that war, because you knew that Hitler was a monster. That had stuck in my mind -- what and whom the fight was against. But having just seen all of the information about what the French citizens went through, I had a greater sense of whom the fighting had been for. I walked down to the water, dipped my hand in it, and turned so that my back was to the ocean. I pictured my father, Isaac Pope, and Charles Johnson -- all dear, peaceful, gentle men I have had the honor to know -- emerging from the landing vehicles and trying to ensure that the trucks somehow hauled the Howitzers out of the ocean. Looking up and seeing the cliff that rises up just yards from the ocean, I wondered how in the world they had gotten the equipment up the cliffs.

At that moment, it struck me that during their landing, my father and the other soldiers knew what in some sense it had taken me decades to register...whom they were there to save. How both daunting and inspiring I am guessing that must have felt. In a photo of a shop window I took in Normandy, there is a sign reading "Welcome to Our Liberators" that appears all over France today, reflecting the palpable sense of the gratitude so many French people feel to Americans, as though the liberation had only just now happened.

I also wondered something else, with a smile. My father was a francophile, like me, and like both my mother and me, he loved the French language. His accent was so good that when he spoke French during WWII in France and later in Belgium, the French and the Belgians assumed he was one of their own. He grew up poor in Hartford, Connecticut, attended Wesleyan College and then Columbia in NYC. He was drafted and then went to Officer Candidate School soon after the U.S. entered the fighting. So at Utah Beach last month, I wondered whether my father was perhaps also excited that he would be able to speak a language that he had always loved in a country where that was the native tongue.

Listening to veterans over the years, I struggle as I hear about war...some of the veterans I greatly respect saying it (whatever their war was) was all a waste and nothing but carnage, some I greatly respect saying it (whatever their war was) was vile but that it was necessary because it was against things that are even more vile. My respect for all of them and their obvious sincerity makes me wish all the more that those who have the power to order our military into danger would try to find other ways to protect the lives of all. I know it is complicated to decide how much to try and how long to wait when others are oppressed and even killed, but the treasures that are these veterans renders it all the more compelling that we know the truth about why our government sent them and will want to send the veterans of the future into war.

I wonder how it has felt, as Kathleen Barry has written in her brilliant book, Unmaking War, Remaking Men,**** to be a man in the United States, growing up knowing that (as has been true until very recently) only people of your sex are considered expendable. Some I know would say, "I consider myself responsible to protect my country, my family, and democracy," and I do not question that that motivates them. But Barry's challenge to us is to consider how it affects our country to raise one sex to know that they may well die for the decisions their government makes to go to war, while the other sex has not been raised to know that about themselves.

Now that women can in some cases serve in combat roles, the considerations are somewhat changed, but until and unless we have another military draft, we will not again have generations of people who, like the men who served in World War II and through the years until the draft ended in 1973, were considered -- without it being so baldly stated -- expendable. If I try to put myself in the position of a man whose age made him eligible for the draft during that time or who wanted to enlist anyway, I wonder how it would make me feel about women, who grew up without the expectation, never mind the requirement, that they could serve in combat and die at a very young age. What a strange combination of expectation, demand, and for some, what would be considered great privilege to be connected with men but not with women.

Then think about the candid statement many veterans have made about the intense fear of even knowing you could be drafted, not to mention actually being in combat, since courage in battle does not mean becoming unafraid, and terror is a common and nearly universal feeling when one is at war. Those feeling terror are expected not to mind or at least somehow to manage to survive unscathed by the terror caused by knowing they could die at any moment. They are too often expected to zoom past the devastating grief of losing beloved comrades in battle ... or losing their own innocence about the evil that humans can inflict on each other. Are these not intolerable burdens to place on anyone? And how shocking and unconscionable it is that we rush to call those who are not unscathed "mentally ill" rather than deeply human.

Whatever we feel about war in general or about a particular war, this is a plea to declare today our independence as a nation from those who would pathologize -- and distance themselves from -- those who have suffered in war, be they men or women, be their suffering due to combat or to having been sexually assaulted or victimized in other ways.

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-372v-i1MM shows a bit of the ceremony
**http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/02/11/remarks-president-obama-and-president-hollande-france-arrival-ceremony has the full text of the addresses by both President Obama and Président Hollande
***whenjohnnyandjanecomemarching.weebly.com, and Facebook page "When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home"
****http://www.kathleenbarry.net/books.htm

 

 What Americans Should Know -- and Do -- About VA Scandal 

First posted at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/s...

Published on May 22, 2014 by Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D. in Science Isn't Golden 0
inShare Good it is that some Veterans Affairs cover-ups are now widely known, but the rest of the iceberg remains dangerously hidden. A primary reason for what remains hidden and for the extremely late exposure of the cover-ups now in the news is that American veterans are largely invisible to most other citizens.

We live in a nation that is not only war-illiterate but even military-illiterate,* because Americans don't like to think about war, veterans comprise less than 7% of the population, and war veterans are "the other 1%." It is rare for anyone who doesn't live with a veteran to choose to meet, get to know, or listen to a veteran. This leads to often soul-crushing isolation for veterans and their loved ones, and it creates in this country a dangerous divide, one whose disastrous consequences are still developing -- largely invisibly -- even as I write.

Most Americans go about their daily lives heedless of the needs and goals of veterans and their families, with the exception of the occasional Congressional Medal of Honor recipient's appearance on a talk show, a few commercials, knee-jerk "Thank you for your service" statements, and tear-jerker media stories about a deployed parent returning home and surprising their child at a major sporting event that is televised on the big screen, denying the child and parent privacy and the freedom to focus on what they each really need at that moment.

 Small wonder that the current scandal about some VA officials' schemes to conceal the excruciatingly long periods of time many veterans were kept waiting comes as a surprise. Any nonveteran who had bothered listening to a veteran or two would at least have known about the wait times if not the purposeful concealment of their lengths.

I hope that every nonveteran who reads this will consider marking Memorial Day by listening -- just sitting and listening -- to a veteran from any era. Col. (Ret.) David Sutherland, founder and head of the important Dixon Center of Easter Seals** that helps communities come together to support veterans and their families, speaks often about the harm done when what happens on deployments become secrets back home. Veterans' loved ones already carry unfairly the lion's share of responsibility for providing support and understanding to veterans, and their wider communities need to offer to listen to both veterans and those close to them. That is what The Welcome Johnny and Jane Home Project is about, and it is as simple as it sounds -- just listening but doing so with respect and one's whole heart -- and is powerful and positively transformative for both veteran and listener, far beyond what most people would expect.*** The very simple information for prospective listeners and for veterans is at listen2veterans.org

Isolation and invisibility, as Col. Sutherland and I have written, are prime contributors to the high rate of veterans' suicides, which are estimated -- no doubt underestimated -- to be 22 a day, and the rates are highest among the older veterans.**** So when you decide to do a listening session, a great thing to do is to do it at one of to Veterans' Homes, other nursing homes, or hospice facilities, where you are likely to find those from World War II, the Korean War, and the Viet Nam War.

Getting back to the current VA exposé, let's look at what else is dangerous. Horrific problems in the delivery of high-quality healthcare to veterans -- like the horrific barriers to getting high-quality healthcare to most Americans -- deserves more than what Andy Warhol predicted would be every American's 15 minutes of fame. The media lose interest when there is "no more news," but the suffering of inadequately cared-for or uncared-for veterans will long continue. Let us hope that some responsible journalists will refuse to allow these concerns to disappear back under the rug.

There is the additional problem that in this country, too many of those who hold the power find easy ways to lift responsibility from their shoulders and place it on those of others. All morning, I have been looking for what I recalled -- perhaps imprecisely -- as a phrase from a T.S. Eliot poem I read in college. The phrase I have tried to find is "a committee to appoint a committee," which popped to mind yesterday when President Barack Obama announced that he has ordered "an investigation" into VA wrongdoings.^ The Eliot quotation I managed to find is this:

Cry cry what shall I cry?

The first thing to do is to form the committees:

The consultative councils, the standing committees, select committees and sub-committees.

One secretary will do for several committees.               http://quotes.dictionary.com/Cry_cry_...

If not only President Obama but also his many predecessors truly had no idea until now about the VA's rampant mistreatment of veterans, there is no excuse for that ignorance. In July, 2007, Veterans for Common Sense filed a landmark lawsuit, Veterans for Common Sense v. Shinseki, aimed to end unconscionable delays and active mistreatment of veterans, especially for their emotional needs. In 2011, I wrote about what happened to that case, and I copy part of my essay here because it is sadly still relevant three years later:

the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs to overhaul its mental health system, calling it “shameful” and plagued by “egregious delays.” At last, veterans thought, they might receive prompt and effective support as they tried to heal from the emotional carnage wrought by war and by the almost unimaginable culture clash between being at war and trying to come home.

The court order gave the VA a chance to make a major turnaround; take a good, hard look at what it has been doing that has failed to help and even made many veterans worse; identify those in its system whom veterans described as caring and helpful; try to make the approaches of the latter into its standard; and consider what other, perhaps less traditional approaches they might implement. The Court of Appeals sent the case back to district court so that a plan for providing better care could be devised. This opportunity was especially important in light of the steadily-rising rates of suicide committed by veterans not just of current wars but of earlier ones as well.

Instead, according to a recent New York Times report, rather than working with the plaintiffs — the nonprofit groups Veterans United for Truth and Veterans for Common Sense — to come up with a better plan, the VA has chosen to appeal that ruling. This is all the more tragic and mystifying, given that the VA’s raison d’etre is surely to assist veterans and given that the court declared that the VA’s failure to address veterans’ needs constituted an infringement of their constitutional rights, i.e., to receive mental health care and to the timely adjudication of their emotional disability claims.

The court noted that the VA had no suicide prevention officers at any outpatient clinic and that at 70 percent of its locations there was no system to track potentially suicidal patients. Media coverage of veterans suffering from despondency has included alarming stories of those who contacted the VA, said outright — often on repeated occasions — that they wanted to kill themselves, and either received no appointments at all or only many weeks or months in the future or did not even receive a return phone call. Often, these stories are prompted by the fact that these veterans went on to kill themselves while waiting for VA staff to help.

Their ways of dealing with suicidal despair are far from the only major problems in the VA system. [1] For years, its senior officials have acknowledged in their press releases that they try one measure after another to stem the rising tides of substance abuse, family violence, and homelessness. But reports of successful programs are rare. [1] When writing my book about veterans, I was able to identify only two instances of specific programs that seemed to be meeting with success. Those involved the use of mindfulness work and meditation, and in one case, of explicit grappling with the intense and varied, moral conflicts that plague so many vets. [1] There are probably other effective VA programs, but what was striking was the way that, as I tracked the VA’s press releases since the start of the United States’ war in Afghanistan, those at the top of the VA hierarchy continued to report increases in the manifestations of emotional trauma and other psychological problems.

Recent months have brought reports of the ineffectiveness of psychiatric drugs in treating those with war-caused trauma and of deaths from drug interactions, sometimes interactions between psychiatric drugs and sometimes between those drugs and prescription drugs of other kinds. These reports are particularly disturbing in light of the heavy and increasing use of psychiatric drugs as the primary or only approach to emotional problems for VA patients.

It is hard not to wonder what the top brass at the VA are thinking. Surely they realize that at the very least, their decision to appeal the court order makes them appear unconcerned about providing help for those they are supposed to serve. Bending over backward to give them the benefit of the doubt, we could assume that they have been as taken in as many in the mental health system by the claims of pharmaceutical companies that their products are cure-alls and by the claims of the powers-that-be that psychotherapy is effective for people who have been traumatized by war. It is rare to hear veterans report that psychoactive drugs have been helpful to them, though some do. It is almost as rare to hear veterans say that psychotherapy was the only thing they needed in order to heal, although it is effective for some. Almost invariably, however, those who have moved toward healing have said that connecting with other veterans, connecting with others in the wider community, and becoming involved in activities in which they focus on helping others and/or in creative realms have been helpful.

The VA would far better serve veterans if they dropped their appeal of the court order and instead invested some of their considerable resources in what veterans, rather than Pharma and the traditional mental health community, say they have found salutary. Furthermore, the VA could recognize that it is worth implementing throughout its system the mindfulness, meditation, and moral conflict foci that have been shown to be effective but that few of their staff all ever use.

For now, as the Ninth Circuit Court panel declared, it is shameful that the VA is appealing the court order for it to reduce the suffering of those whom our government has sent to war.^^

In January, 2013, Veterans for Common Sense lost its bid for the United States Supreme Court to hear its appeal. Veterans for Common Sense is a non-profit based in Washington, DC.^^^

If reading about that brave and compassionate lawsuit makes you feel sad and powerless, this is the time to remember that you are not powerless and that just listening to any veteran is helpful to the veteran and the listener. Here are a typical comment from a veteran who had a listening session and from a listener:

Brock McIntosh, Afghanistan veteran (U.S. Army) (at listen2veterans.org) said: When I came back from Afghanistan, hearing the words “Thank You” from people who didn’t know what I did or saw was an empty gesture. More than anything, I wanted my community to listen to the stories of veterans like myself—to participate in that moral struggle, and gain a deeper awareness of the meaning of war. The Welcome Johnny and Jane Home Project understands the important role that civilians can perform simply by listening to veterans actively and without judgment, generating new opportunities for veterans to serve their communities by educating them about the nuanced reality of war.

A nonveteran who listened to a veteran's story in The Welcome Johnny and Jane Home Project said: I decided to do this to try to help a veteran, and the veteran I listened to said it did help. What I had not expected was the powerfully positive effect that the listening had on me. My politics are very different from the veteran's but that was irrelevant. This was about human connection. By listening to what this veteran had been through in the military and then after coming home, I learned about their humanity but also about my own. I was inspired by the person's integrity and honesty and the courage in speaking so openly to me.

For Memorial Day -- and every day -- let us work together to end the disconnection of veterans from the rest of us, to connect through our common humanity.

-----------------------------------------------------

*Paula J. Caplan. 2011. When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. listen2veterans.org

**http://dixon.easterseals.com/site/Pag...

***listen2veterans.org

****Col.(Ret.) David Sutherland & Paula J. Caplan. 2013. Unseen wounds. Philadelphia Inquirer. February 10.

^ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-defends-his-veterans...

^^ http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-isnt-golden/201108/ve...

^^^veteransforcommonsense.org/

©Copyright 2014 by Paula J. Caplan                           All rights reserved

Keeping Despair At Bay While Fighting for Change
First published on November 22, 2013 by Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D. in Science Isn't Golden


I belong to a Facebook page where many wonderful women and some wonderful men who are military veterans from various generations have recently helped lead movements to reduce sexual assault in the military, ensure that victims are treated with humanity and respect, and increase the chances that the perpetrators will no longer be protected or excused.

They have done valiant work. Earlier this week, hopes were high when a number of women United States Senators and some sexual assault survivors met together on Capitol Hill. Despite disagreements among the Senators about what kind of legislation is needed—whether to continue for still more years the ineffective effort to get the military to handle the problems as it should or whether to have oversight from outside the military—it was a history-making event.

Those veterans working and hoping for change were understandably disappointed when no vote on the legislative proposals was taken, and the Senate is not scheduled to reconvene until December 9. The veterans can of course be forgiven for wishing for change, and it is sad to see those who already lost one kind of innocence by being assaulted by trusted military oomrades and then lost other kinds of innocence by having their integrity and human worth impugned when the perpetrators' misdeeds were ignored or, in some cases, the perpetrators were even held up as model servicemembers, now losing their innocence about the pace of change when bureaucracy, power, politics, and sexism combine.

One veteran on the Facebook page in question wrote today that "All Rosa Parks said was 'NO.'... And the rest is history." No doubt his intention was to inspire his colleagues to keep saying "No!" we must not forget that Rosa Parks did not refuse to give up her bus seat that day in 1955 simply because she was tired. She was already a recognized leader of the local NAACP, and of course that organization had taken a leadership role in fighting for civil rights. So her "No!" emerged from a broadly-based, longstanding movement, and it helped propel that movement forward, but just look how racism continues to thrive nearly six decades since her famous bus ride.

And consider the Second Wave of the feminist movement, which began more than four decades ago but has utterly failed to get the U.S. to pass an Equal Rights Amendment (which Canada did, impelled by a handful of brave and brilliant women within a few weeks), has utterly failed to get the U.S. at the federal level to mandate any paid leave for new parents or caretakers (again, contrast this with Canada's 12 months of paid leave), has failed to achieve equal pay for work of equal value, and has failed to stop sexual assault and other violence against women and children.

Veterans from World War II and subsequent wars are often only now beginning to tell anyone that they were sexually assaulted in the military, and widespread recognition of the magnitude of the problem—at least tens of thousands of cases in the past year, with rare prosecution and even rarer punishment for the perpetrators but common and vicious victim-blaming and psychiatrizing of the targets—is only a few years old, with media and Congressmembers' attention peaking in the last year or so.

When I used to do work in court cases, I used to warn people: "You probably think that once you get into court and have a chance to tell your story, the judge will recognize that you are telling the truth, will see how horribly you have been treated, and will see that justice is done. It is dangerous to believe that. So many things can keep that from happening that I urge you to think of it as 'the so-called justice system,' not the justice system." Of course we all wish that violence, injustice, and inhumanity would vanish like the morning dew when the warm sun of truth is shone upon it. But that ain't how it works.

Those of you who are fighting for these changes and for others, never doubt the value and power of what you have already achieved! Yes, you are exhausted, but you have already done great things. Massive public education is an essential step toward change. Legislators and judges and bureaucracies like the military are slower to respond. But this nation and the world now knows a lot of essential truth that was hidden before what you have done.

I am guessing it must have been in the 1980s when the fabulous, Black feminist activist lawyer Flo Kennedy (see the great picture of her on wikipiedia under Florynce Kennedy, and read her book, Color Me Flo) came to Toronto to speak at an event with Gloria Steinem. Kennedy, who tended to wear jackets with long fringes on the sleeves and cowgirl boots and hats,coined the phrase often misattributed to Steinem: "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle," and it's reported that when, on their joint speaking tours, a man would ask if she and Gloria were lesbians, she would respond, "Are you my alternative?" She was hilarious, but what I remember most was something she said that night, with which she ended her speech, and she said it in deadly earnest. I remind myself of it every chance I get, and I can only paraphrase from memory what she said with eloquence, but I want those who are struggling to end sexual assault in the military and, for that matter, those who are struggling to end any injustice, to know the gist of her message. I think she was at least six feet fall, and from the podium, she looked down at us, her audience, and said that feminists keep telling her they're burning out, they're tired of working so hard and seeing so little change. Eying us sternly, she said something like, "Nobody told us it would be easy. And nobody told us it would be fast. And of course we get tired. But for the sake of our daughters and our sisters and our mothers and all those who will come after us, we cannot afford to burn out!" Amen!

©Copyright 2013 by Paula J. Caplan                 All rights reserved