BBF4MF.1 - Civilian Bias
Build a Better Future for Military Families, Part One: Civilian Bias
Watch the rest of the BBF4MF video series:
BBF4MF Intro | Part 1: Civilian Bias | Part 2: Political Power | Part 3: Human Dignity
Alright, so for this first part of my three-part series on Building a Better Future for Military Families, I'm going to talk about bias and how it works, specifically civilian bias, which is the feelings and beliefs and maybe even convictions that some people have that people who serve are somehow less than everyone else, or more than everyone else, or in some way not as trustworthy as other average people.
So a quick story to illustrate my point. My partner and then-girlfriend were carving pumpkins for Halloween one year and my back had gone out. I'm leaning over this footstool carving the pumpkin on the ground thinking ‘This is fine,’ this is what veterans do. She insists I call the Nurse Advice Line, which I do. The nurse insists, “If you're having back pain so bad that you can feel it in your balls,” which I could, “then you should get to the ER.” So we go to the ER and my partner’s like, “I'm gonna be there, I'm going to support you.”
We check in around 10:30, maybe 11 pm, and being seen for my vitals takes an hour. At some point, I ask for a gurney to lay down and take the weight off my back. The nurses there make a big thing, “It's so difficult,” blah blah blah… I'm lying down on the gurney, and she's sitting next to me near the nurse's station. She can hear them rambling on about other patients’ information. They're flirting with one another, taking their sweet ass time. Only three people are in the ER, and I'm one of them. My partner has been working in hospital chaplaincy for years at that point, she had been she was doing a residency, so she's familiar with medical settings. In the fourth hour (about 3am), we'd had enough, and our only option was to go across the street to the university medical system, which we did. So we spent four hours for nothing except vitals and a bunch of HIPAA violations.
So we go across the street. My vitals are taken, and I get a painkiller injection within 25 minutes, and we're done. Twenty-five minutes in private healthcare versus 4 hours with the VA. As we are driving back to my place I'm exhausted because I've finally got the weight off my back with the painkillers, and she said, I'll never forget this; she said
“All those years you talked about the VA, I thought you were exaggerating!”
My partner knows me well enough now, and I think she probably did then, that I'm not prone to exaggeration. What her comment disclosed was that she didn't believe the stories I was telling her about the VA until she saw them herself. That's what I mean by bias, that's what I mean when I say there's something deeper and more nuanced than trust. I believe civilians can trust soldiers and veterans and still treat them in a way that is untrusting.
The takeaway for part one of this series on Building a Better Future for Military Families is about trust. It's about trusting people to narrate their own experiences in a trustworthy and reliable manner. For my first post for this video series, I’ve used an image from Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World, a book written by the journalist who brought us the #MeToo movement.
I mentioned that because we already have the structure, the language, for believing people when they narrate their own experience. All we have to do is apply it to military families; trusting military families means believing them when they share their stories. In the next couple of parts, I'll talk about political power and how it intersects with civilian bias experienced by soldiers and veterans. Political Power and Civilian Bias intersect to deprive military families of human dignity. I’ll also talk about how civilians can ally with us to speak up and use their privilege to build a better future for us all.
