Do Military Veterans Really Need To Panhandle?

For the past several days my local grocery store had two old guys wearing ballcaps announcing what battleship they were on for a few months several decades ago standing in front of each door. They were asking for donations (i.e., panhandling) “for veterans.” Funny, I was under the impression that I’ve already been robbed many times over by the IRS to pay for “veterans’ benefits.” Why the panhandling? And why are veterans, who were paid for their “service” to the military/industrial/congressional complex, and who sometimes can retire from the military at age 40 on a big, fat, taxpayer-funded pension, worthy of even more “contributions”? Most of them “double dip” for the rest of their lives, eventually earning a second pension, and the luckier ones became very affluent or wealthy by working for defense contractors. There are many other people in my community who are certainly more needy, but the grocery store only collects donations for them for about a week or two at Christmas time when they let the Salvation Army raise money on their property.

Laurence Vance would not be surprised to learn that my church service started off this morning with a “‘Thanks to Our Heroes” prayer, a request to write letters to those soldiers who are participating in the occupation of Afghanistan, and an admonition that our “heroes” are responsible for our ability to go to church. Yeah, right. As though a couple of dozen of very ugly, bearded old men in moo moos who live in caves in Afghanistan (the dreaded “Taliban”) threaten to take over all of America and keep us all from going to church were it not for our “heroes.”

UPDATE: P.G. writes: “Let’s talk Memorial Day in the U.S.  About 4,600 American military people have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 30 times as many innocent civilians have died. . .When is their Memorial Day? They get no respect at all. If you bring the topic up, patriotic Americans will simply say “Hey, sh_t happens.” Also from P.G.: “Did you know that a mid-thirties officer with about 15 years in the military with two kids living overseas. . .would have to make $150,000 per year in the private sector to have a comparable lifestyle?. . .It’s one of the best kept secrets in the military. I knew officers [in Japan] 20 years ago taking home over $11,000 per month.”

ANOTHER UPDATE:  R.M. writes that I forgot to mention “disability.” Many military bureaucrats, he says, drop a case of beer on their foot or claim to have strained their backs picking something up, and then get a “disability” check every month from the government for the rest of their lives.  The current generation of veterans claims to be “the most medically and mentally troubled generation of former troops the nation has ever seen” according to a recent news article on today’s record-breaking amounts of “disability” payments.

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6:59 pm on May 27, 2012