BBF4MF.2 - Political Power
Build a Better Future for Military Families, Part 2: Political Power
Watch the rest of the BBF4MF video series:
BBF4MF Intro | Part 1: Civilian Bias | Part 2: Political Power | Part 3: Human Dignity
You might think that soldiers and veterans have a lot of social and political power, but they often have a lot less than you might think. Let's explore why.
In part one of my series Building a Better Future for Military Families, I talked about bias and how civilian bias can make us think less of soldiers, veterans, and their families than we're even aware of. In this second part, I will talk about political power, social capital, and how there's often less of it going around military families than you think. And the reason for that is actually kind of complicated. On the one hand, civilians often think the military is one big thing, as though we can “Support the Troops” without specifically caring about Johnny or Jane, who came from the military. We subsume all soldiers’ concerns and interests into one big blob we call The Military. This homogenization of the military actually works against getting to know soldiers and veterans and their families themselves.
For example, there's one officer to five enlisted people. But the people we're used to hearing from in society the people are usually officers, who represent less than 20 percent of the military. Most soldiers and veterans were enlisted, many of them have been to combat (in our the last 20 years we've been at war), but there's more than rank. There's military specialty, rank, grade, length and character of service, all of these different ways that military experience can be fleshed out. Each also influences what kind of power, social capital, you might have. If you have a dishonorable discharge, then you're not going to have as much power as a four-star general who served 30 years and goes on CNN every other week. If you're a finance clerk when you were in, you're going to have less social capital than the special forces operator who deployed 17 times to Afghanistan and knows three languages. These are the realities of service that influence the kind of power that an individual veteran or service member, or their family might have.
But here's the rub. Some people may want political power, but others may not. I want political power; I want the conversation to change around soldiers and veterans. I want human dignity for soldiers and veterans, and I'm willing to fµ¢king fight for it, but not everybody wants to do the same. I've spoken to plenty of other service members and veterans who just want to lay low. For example, one young man in seminary said, “What [administrators] don't know can't hurt me.” He was basically saying I'm going to remain under the radar. I'm not going to rock the boat because I know how fragile political power is, and he didn’t want to get hurt.
So, what is political power? Put another way, what does the lack of political power look like?
When I filed a federal labor complaint at Duke University, it was a shit show with how poorly the investigation and the interviews were conducted. I wasn't able to find a satisfying amount of accountability because the law that was written to protect veterans was written so poorly. We can write shitty laws for veterans and they won't change because veterans don't have, and aren’t collectively willing to seize, the political power required to change them. I'm not talking about just voting, I'm talking about the ability to rely on the fact of my service to affect change in the 116th Congress after discovering all the loopholes and sucking chest wounds in VEVRAA. I pounded the pavement on Capitol Hill and I went to the House VA Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, the House Committee on Education and Labor, all of these different committees in the House and in the Senate. Most were chaired by non-veterans, and when I spoke to staff, or if I got the opportunity to speak to a Member themselves, they just kind of nodded their head, “Thank You For Your Service”, and did nothing.
The most glaring example of this is with Mike Levin, who represents Laguna Niguel, who hangs up on me, accuses me of being angry and disrespectful. Nothing will change as long as civilians can rely on stereotypes and caricatures to dismiss the legitimate concerns of soldiers and veterans. That's what I mean when I say that soldiers and veterans lack political power. We I can't actually say “I'm a veteran, therefore I deserve this,” I have to do more than that. I can't just vote. I can't just go to town hall meetings. There are forces working against us organizing, internal things, like our “shut up and drive on” mentality, the “Don't Rock the Boat” mentality that I got from other veterans. Our political power is going to be more difficult to assert than it would be for other groups that do have political power, that have organized, and enjoy a certain amount of what some people call enfranchisement.
This second part has been about power, about a lack of power, and what soldiers and veterans have the power to do and not do. In part three of my series on Building a Better Future for Military Families, I'll talk about what civilian allies and soldiers and veterans can do to gain more political power to assert our human dignity and see the change that I think we all need to see in the world around military families, soldiers, and veterans.
