There has been a great deal of outrage lately about the conditions in our veterans hospitals and about the general care of those who have given their time and various parts of their bodies and minds to defend this country in its illegal wars. The media is rising on the back of a stars and stripes tattooed horse trumpeting its anger over the shabby care afforded the same vets to whom the same media has announced we owe so much.
Politicians in need of their 5 minutes of fame are carrying on like someone has killed their first born, a meager chance since the children of the rich or the connected rarely go to war.
Everyone and his brother wanted Shinseki’s head. I look around and I ask myself, where the hell have these people been for the last sixty years? In 1960, I worked on a film at Walter Reed, the flagship of the VA hospitals in Washington DC. It was a swamp then. From what I can gather it hasn’t improved since; nor have the rest of the facilities. There is an excellent article by John Cory in Reader Supported News dealing with the subject of how this is anything but a new problem and how it has been ignored or shunted aside since the Korean war.
The truth is, that our nation, for all its breast beating about how great our vets are, has a disgraceful history of taking care of them when they come back home after their service. A good part of the fault lies first with the media which would rather run a feel good story of a vet returning home and surprising his kid at grade school than they would a story of a crippled vet returning who is unable to get proper care. It’s simply a matter of which story will sell more corn flakes.
But the ultimate responsibility, like so much else that has been sloughed off, lies with congress, that snake pit of self-serving phonies, who steal their salaries from your taxes and give back as little as possible.
Why doesn’t the VA have the means to do its job? Well, in many cases it does and it’s just too unwilling or incompetent to do its job. For that it should be raked over the coals. There are too many instances where sophisticated and expensive equipment lies unused in hospital storage rooms simply because there is no one on the staff able to run it. This is a failure of the organization and for this, heads should roll. There has been a great deal of talk about what a great general Shinseki was and that’s all well and good but he isn’t running a combat division now, he’s running hospitals for the kids from his army that got their lives blasted apart while they were in his combat divisions. It’s a different job with a different skill set and a different set of criteria, and both the President and the man who is replacing Shinseki need to recognize this.
But it’s not that Shinseki had done a terrible job. What he did was to make the mistake of not seeing that he was dealing with a huge bureaucracy that was all but unmanageable until one erased all the entrenched forces that were more busy protecting their little fiefdoms than they were taking care of the veterans. Shinseki, with his military background didn’t see that he was not inheriting an established functional command when he took over the VA. He expected his commanders to be up to the job instead of being busy protecting their asses. What he should have done was to clear house and install new and trusted department heads. What he did do was trust the existing department heads to solve their problems. That was naïve because the existing department heads actually were the problem. They had been entrenched in a bureaucracy, 250,000 strong, so long that nothing could be accomplished with them in the middle management positions. Shinseki should have put his own people in all the upper management jobs and let then solve the problems below them. Instead he left the grifters and malingerers in place and they buried him.
But there are even more cases, where the problem lies in the hospital’s inability to afford the proper personnel to do the necessary jobs, and that’s congress’ fault. Everyone who can read, hear, or watch TV should be aware of the shortcomings of our present congress. To have this bunch of know nothing, do nothings conducting hearings on this problem, for which they are a principal cause, is ludicrous. There’s nothing wrong with being a financial conservative but there’s everything wrong with being a moron who doesn’t understand where priorities lie. First congress doesn’t vote the money to ably protect American facilities overseas and something like Benghazi happens and then they don’t vote enough money to take care of the kids who get crippled in those kinds of events.
It’s obvious that congress has been bought and paid for in the service of the rich not having to pay their fair share, but isn’t there a tiny morsel of humanity left in those two useless groups that recognizes their responsibility to those who have, through their sacrifice, enabled our legislator’s incompetence and dishonesty to exist?