Something more than poppies

November 8, 2007

As I drank my orange juice this morning and caught the tail end of the weather on Good Morning America, a phrase scrolled across the bottom of the screen to indicate other 'major' stories in the Boston area. This phrase announced that a quarter of the US homeless are veterans. Now, I did not see the story from which this statistic is extracted. Nor do I deny it is a statistic that has not so coincidentally made its way to the forefront of our brains just in time for November 11. And, sadly, that little piece of information that scurried across the screen as the weather shifted to some other top ten news story did not surprise me at all.

I wish that story would get more play in the coming days – when people might decide to raise the red, white, and blue or plaster a yellow ribbon somewhere to tip a nod to the fact we have a holiday observed on Monday. But it isn't as cool these days to do that. The edge has worn off and the numbers of casualties reported on the news just blend into the monotony as the story shifts back to Britney Spears' next custody tribulation.

But it won't. That statistic just proves that stories about veterans aren't captivating and compelling to our attention. Well, there may be the one or two hero stories, a nicely edited piece about someone coming home or overcoming adversity, or even another total casualty list of lives lost. I'm not going to deny the merit of those. But what about all the others? What about the ones who survive and have to come home and live?

There is no clear cut answer to homelessness. Everyone has a different story, a different path that led them to that point – and ultimately some level of personal responsibility to help themselves. Even so, don't we have some sort of responsibility to the men and women who made sacrifices and risks to go somewhere and protect this country? Whatever the war and the right or wrong of the government that sent them there, the fact is these people did something so that we did not have to. So that we could sit on our asses and watch stupid television, or send each other youtube clips about inane pop culture, or read up on politics and render our opinions to expostulate but never do anything to enact change.

Or type a bunch of paragraphs to post on a myspace blog…