For me, this wednesday carries a special personal significance as I go through 7th grade. This previous wednesday was Veterans Day, an opportunity to thank those men and women who have served in the U.S. military. It would seem that Americans, and young people in particular, have a hard time relating to veterans, let alone celebrating them, and for good reason. Our culture today increasingly portrays veterans as a group of mostly conservative, uneducated, ornery white men afflicted by a variety of mental illnesses and unemployment. While problems such as mental illness and veteran unemployment are real, the stereotypes they perpetuate do not present an accurate illustration of the veteran population as a whole, which is made up of countless
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The politicization of war has had unfortunate spillovers into our civilian views of veterans, as people increasingly and erroneously place the responsibility for war on service members themselves, failing to dissociate the policy maker from the public servant whose only commitment is to the defense of a country, not to a particular figure. You need not endorse a war's mission to honor those who made sacrifices in the course of it. No one can provide greater cautions about the dangers of war than those who have borne its personal costs.Again, only through meeting members of the veteran community can we begin to understand their role in society and see them not as subjects of a political debate but rather as paragons of service. For these reasons and more, as civilians we must make a concerted effort to engage our peers who are veterans. at the Clark Center Lounge, immediately following a talk by Prof. David Kennedy on Stanford's colored history with. On Memorial Day we mourn the loss of those who served who are no longer with us to share their stories of service. So on Veterans Day let us be grateful for the ones we still have around us,young and old, and join in thanking them for the thankless commitment they made however many years ago to serve a nation, humbly and with no ambition of their
The politicization of war has had unfortunate spillovers into our civilian views of veterans, as people increasingly and erroneously place the responsibility for war on service members themselves, failing to dissociate the policy maker from the public servant whose only commitment is to the defense of a country, not to a particular figure. You need not endorse a war's mission to honor those who made sacrifices in the course of it. No one can provide greater cautions about the dangers of war than those who have borne its personal costs.Again, only through meeting members of the veteran community can we begin to understand their role in society and see them not as subjects of a political debate but rather as paragons of service. For these reasons and more, as civilians we must make a concerted effort to engage our peers who are veterans. at the Clark Center Lounge, immediately following a talk by Prof. David Kennedy on Stanford's colored history with. On Memorial Day we mourn the loss of those who served who are no longer with us to share their stories of service. So on Veterans Day let us be grateful for the ones we still have around us,young and old, and join in thanking them for the thankless commitment they made however many years ago to serve a nation, humbly and with no ambition of their