Collateral Damage
I submit that there's a part of the war story that the MSM is not chewing on: The number of veterans partially or totally disabled by the wars we've [initiated?] [blown up?] [created?] [brewed?]
Before we even get to Iran, there are some sobering numbers out there even beyond the 3100 American lives lost...The nearly one-in-five that will come home with significant impairment.
And, socially, they'll get forced in to the saint/martyr role, perhaps even more than civilian gimps do, because they've served their country. No human failings permitted when they come home with their life extremely altered. No commonsense studying the social model of disability...The medical model makes it easier for others to use the situation of the impaired soldier, not to actually help that soldier or their family, but advance their own agenda, for or against the war.
And, once impaired, will they be:
Dissed by doctors?
Short on dates?
Become slowly "invisible" because so many do not see the impaired at all?
Denied work, socialization, religious observance because of architechtural barriers?
Or, perhaps a new unlooked for force to press for the rights of all with impairments...?
When counting the costs of the war (s) past, present, future, do not leave the impaired veteran out of the equation...
Before we even get to Iran, there are some sobering numbers out there even beyond the 3100 American lives lost...The nearly one-in-five that will come home with significant impairment.
And, socially, they'll get forced in to the saint/martyr role, perhaps even more than civilian gimps do, because they've served their country. No human failings permitted when they come home with their life extremely altered. No commonsense studying the social model of disability...The medical model makes it easier for others to use the situation of the impaired soldier, not to actually help that soldier or their family, but advance their own agenda, for or against the war.
And, once impaired, will they be:
Dissed by doctors?
Short on dates?
Become slowly "invisible" because so many do not see the impaired at all?
Denied work, socialization, religious observance because of architechtural barriers?
Or, perhaps a new unlooked for force to press for the rights of all with impairments...?
When counting the costs of the war (s) past, present, future, do not leave the impaired veteran out of the equation...
posted by imfunnytoo at 10:07 PM
1 Comments:
Many disability historians have studied vets in early periods. A couple of names to look for are Brad Byrom and David Gerber. Don't count on returning soldiers to conceptualize themselves as disabled. They will probably conceive of themselves first as soldiers who are owed their accomodations on the basis of their service -- not on their acquired impairments. Someone near and dear to me studies masculinitiy and acquired disability and the pressure to play down the disability (feminizing) and play up the soldiering (butch) is really strong if a guy wants to argue successfully for expansion of benefits and services.
Where the numbers will help is that they will be less likely to be tarred with the "incompetent or cowardly" brush. In conflicts like the US Civil War, profoundly injured men in the beginning of the war had to cope with a homefront population who assumed that injury meant that you'd lost your cool and gotten hurt because of a mistake you could have avoided. A "real Man" would have fought to the death or returned unscathed. It was only after hundreds of thousands of guys come back all blown up and battlefield photography illustrated the inglorious nature of warfare that the social perception of war shifted and the disabled guy was perceived as a hero. (Again, this comes from the research of people like Stephen Leonard and my partner in crime...)
_ Bridgett
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