The Spinning Wheel #1: Why Vets Commit Suicide

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Nicholas Kristoff is someone I admire as a writer and a person.  His recent article on the disgrace of the Veterans Administration – how it abandons traumatized vets if their scars happen to be, as they increasingly are, mental or spiritual in nature – is poignant and important.  But it overlooks, as most modern media do, the far more important issue, the issue from which we could learn something about ourselves and our destiny, and not just patch up one of the symptoms of our discontent.

The real question is, Why are so many U.S. service men and women suffering from trauma?  Why are they committing suicide in such appalling numbers, according to Kristoff’s report 25 times higher than deaths due to actual combat?

The answer is twofold.  On the one hand, despite appearances, the human race is, slowly and painfully, making progress.  What was perfectly all right yesterday – slavery, torture, genocide, landmines, etc. — is recognized to be wrong today.  On the other hand, most of the world, and America in particular, is advancing rapidly in ever more gruesome and dehumanizing forms of combat.  Drones, for example, which allow men and women to kill without mercy, without awareness of what they are doing (and which are coming soon to a town near you).

Service men and women are only the forefront of this tension.  They are actually brutally dehumanized psychologically even before they get into actual combat.  If we “need” to do this to people (as even Army psychiatrists claim) we are doing something terribly and fundamentally wrong.

Gandhi gave his followers a talisman: ‘think how what you’re about to do affects the poorest person you’ve ever seen.’  We have one at Metta, too: ‘Never degrade a person.  Not yourself, not anyone else.’

If our “security” depends on such degradation it is doomed to fail.  It will never make us secure.  It is time to rethink what security even means and how it can be reached by a path that does not reverse, but harmonizes with human progress.