where credit is due

The next time you pass a homeless man on the street, you might ask in which war he served. In the next several years, chances are good that he (and increasingly she) will say Iraq or Afghanistan.

That grim prediction is based on several facts:

One in three adult homeless males is a veteran and 45 percent of those suffer from mental illness, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

A recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine, meanwhile, found that one in four veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were diagnosed with some kind of mental health problem.

And those are just the ones who found their way to a VA hospital. Many don't. Returning veterans are either embarrassed, untrusting of government, frustrated by bureaucratic gridlock, or simply incapable of navigating the system.

This is an excerpt from an essay by Kathleen Parker. It's a good essay--read the whole thing. bram pointed it out to me and suggested that one of us put up a post about it.

bram had never heard of Kathleen Parker before, but I had. She is one of the stable of right-wing ideologues who write for Jewish World Review. Here's a link to her recent columns for that publication.

I bet I could read any five essays on that page at random and not find one single paragraph that I'd agree with. I know bram well enough to suspect the same would probably hold true for her as well.

Normally I wouldn't link to a column from someone like Parker, unless it would be to mock it. But I have to say it: she does seem to be one of the few right-wingers who actually gets it when it comes to understanding the mental health needs of veterans. She seems to realize that many soldiers come home with a full share of emotional baggage, and that caring for these men and women will require more federal funding than recent Congresses have been willing to subsidize.

Would that more of her right-wing compatriots be as able to view soldiers as more than just replaceable units churned out by the killbot factory. Maybe the tide really has turned with the recent election. Maybe people are starting to wake up to the damage that has been done to this country in recent years. I hope so.

I may never have occasion to write these words again: but thank you, Ms. Parker. Good work.