PENINSULA DAILY NEWS for Tuesday, May 27, 2014 PAGE
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Thank you for being expendable BY COLBY BUZZELL
eight to 10 weeks, but sometimes as long as three to four months. YEARS AFTER I first Keep this in mind: If I’m callreturned from Iraq and started ing the VA, it’s because I’m in having thoughts and visions of really bad shape. killing myself, I’d call the DepartBut when I’d tell them I really ment of Veterans Affairs. needed to see somebody ASAP, They always sooner than that, they’d always put me on hold. tell me the same exact thing: First, an “Sorry. But that’s the earliest we automated can see you.” message would I’ve since learned that when greet me to let things are really bad, it’s better me know there to just show up at the VA emerwas an unusugency room. ally long wait Before, I thought it was a mirbecause of the acle that I survived the Iraq war. large number Buzzell Now I’m thinking it’s a miraof incoming cle I’m still alive after dealing calls. with the VA for so long. Then a recorded message The VA motto was taken from played on a constant loop: Abraham Lincoln’s second presiWelcome to the Department of dential inaugural address, and Veterans Affairs. . . . The VA is can be seen etched on a huge here to serve you. . . . If this is a metal plaque outside the Washmental health emergency or you ington headquarters: are thinking about committing “To care for him who shall suicide, please hang up and call have borne the battle and for his 9-1-1. . . . If you are having widow, and his orphan.” thoughts of hurting others or Since my father is a retired want to talk to a mental health professional hang up and dial the lieutenant colonel — a highly decorated Vietnam veteran — Veterans Crisis Line. . . . I wasn’t about to pull the trig- I’ve been walking by this quote ger just then, I just wanted help, for as long as I can remember. so I held on. I recall one day when I was The wait was long — someabout 7 years old and got sick, times 45 minutes to an hour — at my father drove me to the VA which point someone would pick hospital near Oakland, Calif. up and either put me on hold When the doctor asked me again or transfer me over to how much pain I was in on a someone else to schedule an scale of 1 to 10, I honestly told appointment to seek treatment him it was about a 6 or a 7. for post-traumatic stress disorder. In the waiting room lobby my In my experience, the wait for father scolded me. He said that no matter what, I should always an appointment was typically
tell the doctor that my pain was at least a 10, even a 12, otherwise we’d be waiting around in the lobby all day to be seen. Which was exactly what happened. Same as it ever was. I enrolled in the VA health care system in 2004, soon after a year of service in Iraq. I’ve been to countless VA hospitals since, and they’re all the same. If you want to know what the price of freedom looks like, go to a VA waiting room — wheelchairs, missing limbs, walking wounded, you get all of the above. One day not long ago, while waiting for my PTSD medication, I struck up a conversation with a Vietnam veteran, who told me the message he’d gotten from his
needed some help. I was holding a coffee cup. The doctor asked me how much coffee I drank in an average day. I told her; she then advised me to cut down to one cup a day. When I asked if she could possibly prescribe any medication to go with that one cup a day, she refused. “We used to prescribe drugs all the time,” she explained. “OxyContin, Percocet, Dolophine, Methadose, Vicodin, Xodol, hydrocodone.” But veterans were getting addicted, she said, even dying, from overprescription so doctors had been told to cut back on prescribing. Go down to one cup of coffee day, she told me again, and see STEVE SACK/CAGLE CARTOONS how you feel. I think this recent scandal treatment at the VA, and his may be the best thing ever to country, was not “Thank you for happen to our veterans and hope serving,” but “Thank you for some change will take place being expendable.” because of it. I agreed with him. God knows it’d be nice for vetSoldiers are expendable in erans to just call or walk into a VA war, and veterans are expendable hospital and see somebody and be and forgotten about when they taken care of the same day. return. That’s just the way it is. I don’t think that’d be asking a This recent VA “scandal” over lot. There might be a lot more of prolonged wait time for veteran us alive today if that was the case. care doesn’t surprise me one bit. Sadly, it’s not. Even on MemoPoliticians and many hawkish rial Day, the wait at the VA went Americans are quick to send our on. sons and daughters to go off to Same as it ever was. fight in wars on foreign soil, but ________ reluctant to pay the cost. Once, nearly homeless and Colby Buzzell is the author plagued with thoughts of jumpof Lost in America: A Dead-End ing off the Golden Gate Bridge, I Journey. His essay originally showed up at a VA hospital and appeared in The New York told them I was in bad shape and Times.
How it became the Canadian dream I
T WAS IN 1931 THAT THE historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “the American dream.” The American dream is Nicholas not just a yearning for Kristof affluence, Adams said, but also for the chance to overcome barriers and social class, to become the best that we can be. Adams acknowledged that the United States didn’t fully live up to that ideal, but he argued that America came closer than anywhere else. Adams was right at the time, and for decades. When my father, an Eastern European refugee, reached France after World War II, he was determined to continue to the United States because it was less class bound, more meritocratic and offered more opportunity. Yet today the American dream has derailed, partly because of growing inequality. Or maybe the American dream has just swapped citizenship, for now it is more likely to be found in Canada or Europe — and a central issue in this year’s political campaigns should be how to repatriate it. A report last month in The New York Times by David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy noted that the American middle class is no longer the richest in the world, with Canada apparently pulling ahead in median aftertax income. Other countries in Europe are poised to overtake us as well. In fact, the discrepancy is arguably even greater. Canadians receive essentially
free health care, while Americans pay for part of their health care costs with after-tax dollars. Meanwhile, the American worker toils, on average, 4.6 percent more hours than a Canadian worker, 21 percent more hours than a French worker and an astonishing 28 percent more hours than a German worker, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Canadians and Europeans also live longer, on average, than Americans do. Their children are less likely to die than ours. American women are twice as likely to die as a result of pregnancy or childbirth as Canadian women. And, while our universities are still the best in the world, children in other industrialized countries, on average, get a better education than ours. Most sobering of all: A recent OECD report found that for people aged 16 to 24, Americans ranked last among rich countries in numeracy and technological proficiency.
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CONOMIC MOBILITY is tricky to measure, but several studies show that a child born in the bottom 20 percent economically is less likely to rise to the top in America than in Europe. A Danish child is twice as likely to rise as an American child. When our futures are determined to a significant extent at birth, we’ve reverted to the feudalism that our ancestors fled. “Equality of opportunity — the ‘American dream’ — has always been a cherished American ideal,” Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist at Columbia University, noted in a recent speech. “But data now show that this
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is a myth: America has become the advanced country not only with the highest level of inequality, but one of those with the least equality of opportunity.” Consider that the American economy has overall grown more quickly than France’s. But so much of the growth has gone to the top 1 percent that the bottom 99 percent of French people have done better than the bottom 99 percent of Americans. Three data points: ■ The top 1 percent in America now own assets worth more than those held by the entire bottom 90 percent. ■ The six Wal-Mart Stores Inc. heirs are worth as much as the bottom 41 percent of American households put together. ■ The top six hedge fund managers and traders averaged more than $2 billion each in earnings last year, partly because
of the egregious “carried interest” tax break. President Barack Obama has been unable to get financing for universal pre-kindergarten; this year’s proposed federal budget for pre-K for all, so important to our nation’s future, would be a bit more than a single month’s earnings for those six tycoons. Inequality has become a hot topic, propelling Bill de Blasio to become mayor of New York City, turning Sen. Elizabeth Warren into a star, and elevating the economist Thomas Piketty into such a demigod that my teenage daughter asked me the other day for his 696-page tome.
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LL THIS GROWING awareness is a hopeful sign, because there are policy steps that we could take that would create opportunity and dampen inequality.
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We could stop subsidizing private jets and too-big-to-fail banks, and direct those funds to early education programs that help break the cycle of poverty. We can invest less in prisons and more in schools. We can impose a financial transactions tax and use the proceeds to broaden jobs programs like the earned-income tax credit and career academies. And, as Alan S. Blinder of Princeton University has outlined, we can give companies tax credits for creating new jobs. It’s time to bring the American dream home from exile.
________ Nicholas D. Kristof is a twotime Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times. Email him via http://tinyurl. com/nkristof.
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