Sometimes, you look around, and the world seems to have so many problems, that it feels like all you can do is shake your head. It is hard not to feel powerless when you see so many problems, and so much indifference to those problems by so many.
One thing that we should all be able to agree on is to take care of veterans after they have fought in wars that we collectively sent them to. In theory, it should be easy to agree on this. Really, it should not be a partisan issue, there should be nothing controversial about it.
Yet, it is just one more in a long list of things that seems to polarize us. One more in a long list of things that we generally fail to address adequately.
There are more veterans who have been killed by their own hand since just 2008 than were killed in the entirety of the Vietnam conflict. That is an epidemic that we hardly ever hear about. Imagine if these kinds of numbers were the direct result of our decision of putting them in harm's way, if they had died literally fighting the conflicts that we collectively decided to engage in. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars grew unpopular when casualties mounted, and when our seeming promises of quick and decisive success failed to come to fruition. Yet, the casualties in those two conflicts combined are but a fraction of the 60,000 veterans who have ended their own life in just over one decade.
Veterans need our help, and deserve our gratitude. Let us remember that this Veteran's Day.
More U.S. Veterans Have Committed Suicide In The Last Decade Than Died In The Vietnam War By Marco Margaritoff Published November 11, 2019 Updated April 13, 2020:
Since 2008, more than 60,000 U.S. veterans have taken their own lives, with more than half of those deaths via firearms
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