Posted on | May
26, 2013 | 5 Comments
Riverside National
Cemetery (Staff/TERRY PIERSON)
Memorial Day. We honor
the men and women who died while serving in the military. We honor them with
parades, speeches, wreaths, flags, crisp salutes and glistening tears.
We honor our soldiers,
sailors and pilots because where would we be without them? We honor them even
as more die in a far-off country that we have already said we’re leaving. We
will honorthem next year. And for years to come.
Even though Memorial Day
Weekend can be a time of pleasant distraction — barbecues, baseball games,
blowout holiday sales — it is not entirely lost on us that Memorial Day is the time we pay our respects to the people
who died for our barbecues and baseball games. Few would deny that we’re very good at Memorial
Day. When it comes to paying tribute to our dead, we’ve got it down.
But when it comes to
doing right by the living, we just can’t seem to get it right.
This is old news. Dry,
stale, rotting-on-the-shelf news. But if I may drag you all the way back to May
8 for a moment, maybe you’ll view Memorial Day in a slightly different context.
On May 8, the paper ran
a local story based on a federal study and congressional testimony. The story
contained three startling numbers.
318. Average number of days
it takes the Department of VeteransAffairs to process a vet’s disability
claim.
900,000. The backlog of veterans’
claims.
2015. When VA secretary says
the backlog will be eliminated — a pledge that is already eroding.
Our story focused on
Riversider Herberto Eddie Garcia, who waited 10 years to get his claim
approved. Sound bad? It’s worse.
Garcia, an ex-Marine,
isn’t what you’d call a recent discharge. He’s 65. Served in a place called
Vietnam and was exposed to a substance called Agent Orange. An incomplete list
of his ailments: coronary artery disease, post traumatic stress disorder,diabetes, skin condition.
Local aides to area
congressmen frequently get cases like this and often uncover stories of lost
files and inquiries the VA simply ignores.
As news of this huge
backlog broke in April, a downright eloquent Vice President Biden said:
“We have a lot of
obligations — to our children, to the elderly, to the poor. But there’s only
one truly sacred obligation in my view, and that’s to equip those we send to
war and care for those who come home from war and their families. That’s a
sacred obligation.”
But Biden wasn’t talking
about mending a broken bureaucracy. He was promoting jobs for vets — an important front in the battle to get them back into
the swing of civilian life.
But there’s also a
sacred obligation to make the wounded and disabled as whole as possible, as
quickly as possible. That we are lagging so far behind suggests it’s a battle
we are losing.
We honor the dead on
Memorial Day. We are grateful for their sacrifice and perhaps comforted that
they are at rest. We also profess boundless gratitude for our living vets. But
we can’t rest until they are comfortable.
Doing right by the dead
while failing the living is not fulfilling a “sacred obligation.” It’s a
national disgrace.
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