Veterans Day 2019
Looking ahead one year, Veterans Day 2020 is going to coincide with the conclusion of a massive presidential campaign. I consider the months prior to a presidential election to be prime “veterans exploitation season,” where political parties and candidates market their patriotism with bite-size political talking points about vets.
It’s politics. It is what it is. Those talking points are not universally incorrect or ill-intentioned. They are just an over-expressed dramatization of one or two pieces of the story of contemporary military service.
Speaking only for myself, the vast majority of people who I talk to are deferential to the veteran community, and genuinely grateful for their service. But well-meaning civilians are fed a steady diet of simplistic narratives that make deeper exchange difficult - vets as superhuman heroes, or vets as broken charity cases. I would imagine many vets feel discomfort when their service gets simplified and used for to fit a political agenda or a commercial agenda, even when it is complimentary.
Signing up to do the wide variety of military jobs that collectively provide defense for the most powerful country on earth is a deeply nuanced and individual set of stories. And as a smaller percentage of the country takes on a larger percentage of the military burden, first-hand experience with military service becomes more and more distant from our decision-makers and from the public.
The rationale for our Veterans Day project in 2019 can be found somewhere in there. We wanted to clear out the layers between well-intentioned civilians and veterans, and see if it would facilitate an authentic and thoughtful dialogue.
For those whose interests lie elsewhere, I urge you to give these videos a look - issues of citizenship, economics, immigration, culture, health, trauma, marriage, camaraderie, race, gender and family are all present, and illuminated through the lens of military service.
The veterans featured in this series of stories, which starts today and lasts until the end of 2019, are post-9/11 veterans from our part of the world, mainly through Bay Area colleges and their student veteran clubs. They are a diverse set by gender, race, socioeconomic status, etc, and we spent precisely zero seconds trying to balance our demographics. It lands like that most of the time.
A huge, huge thanks to (US Army vet) Rebecca Murga (US Maine Corps vet) Andrew Bowen for their work filming and editing these stories. These videos - 12 in all, released twice a week between now and New Years - are a much different look than I think we get from the secondhand or highly-curated brokers who fill our airwaves and newsfeeds. We tried to keep our own personal voices as quiet as possible, and let these friends and veterans speak for themselves.
Hopefully, we can all build a library of veteran voices, and take the time necessary to absorb the experiences, perspectives, and citizenship of our veteran community. - gerard