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It’s Time to Renew the Military Draft

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:23:30 -0500

Praise abounds for our all-volunteer military forces. People vie to express their appreciation, often picking up the check for military folks they see in a restaurant. They stop soldiers, sailors and marines on the street to thank them for their service.
But who are these courageous volunteers? I can tell you who they are not. They are not for the most part the children of middle and upper middle class families in this country. They are not, with few exceptions, the children of the wealthy.
Imagine finishing high school or college and finding no jobs available. What are you to do? Flipping hamburgers until you can find better employment is always a possibility but military recruiters offer a much more lucrative career choice.
To build up the volunteer military we did what private companies do when they have to compete for workers. We upped pay and benefits to make joining the services more attractive.
We also compete to keep folks in the military. The services offer bonuses and other incentives to encourage good service members to continue wearing a uniform instead of going into another field.
Do I have a problem with how much we pay the people who fight for us? Not at all. I think we should have paid them better and provided better benefits when many were in the service only because they had been drafted.
I believe we should have the draft again because we need people from all income levels, all races and religions, all parts of the country to be a part of the force that protects us.
And I believe it should be a universal draft—men and women. The new draft I envision would require one or two years of service from all young Americans. Many would probably be in the military but there might be other ways to perform required service—teaching or assisting in substandard schools where children are destined for failure without special attention, for instance. Or volunteering in crime prevention programs in high-crime areas. Spending a year or two helping to rebuild this country’s crumbling infrastructure might be a possibility.
It might be necessary to stipulate a certain number of draftees for military service. In that case, the draft would have to be a system such as the lottery during the Vietnam War.
I can hear groans at the memory of that from people who lived through that era. Young men lived with the fear of their draft number being chosen.
But let’s face it. We were able to end a disastrous, unnecessary war because every family in America with young sons faced the possibility that their loved ones would be swooped up and sent to fight.
Now we swoop up volunteers, train them and send them to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq. Is anyone truly paying attention to who these men and women are? Does anyone care that someone may have volunteered in order to make a living only to die in Afghanistan?
I am not a pacifist. I believe a strong military is essential. I even believe, God help me, that war is occasionally necessary.
But I also believe that foreign policy should not be left to “experts” in the military or politics. We all need to pay attention to how that policy is made and what its costs are in human lives. We need to be heard while policy is being made.
The draft will be unpopular but so is war. Let’s make sure the people who fight our wars come both from families that can’t afford luxuries and families that have every luxury imaginable.

New Brain MRI Fun

Thu, 3 Mar 2011 18:02:44 -0500

If you know me you know I hate getting these blasted tests, but the one today offered a new diversion.
I beat back the claustrophobia that usually does me in by trying to think funny or ridiculous things.
Somehow just a few minutes into “the tube” the funny thoughts turned to a fantasy, and not the good kind.
I imagined that the technician decided to leave early and forgot to turn off the machine and pull me out of it. By the time he finally did release me from it I had imagined everything from his going to the Bahamas on a sudden vacation to his dropping dead of a heart attack.
I convinced myself while having these absurd thoughts that surely the folks who invented the MRI had incorporated a way for a patient inside one to get out in case of emergency. (When getting a brain MRI, not only are you all the way in the machine but a plastic mask-like contraption is also pulled over your face and locked.)
As soon as the ordeal was over and he had released me from the machine and lifted the mask, I asked if I could get out if he disappeared while I was in there. “Impossible,” he replied. “I have to do it.”
I told him about my new fear and he said, “I would never do that but don’t’ think it hasn’t been done by others.”
Oh, swell. Now while dreading the locking of the face mask and the cacophony of horrible sounds while I’m in the machine for almost an hour, I can imagine a fleeing MRI technician.
In the future I’ll be sure more than one person knows when I’ll have the test and when I should be home. Or maybe I’ll just rent a St. Bernard. Better yet, I’ll rent a bunch of them and show them how to free folks from the @##@# machine. I’ll have them offer claustrophobic people coming out following a head MRI a sip or two of brandy from the flasks around their necks. It would be most welcome.

The Black Boxes Aren’t In Yet

Wed, 3 Nov 2010 21:39:44 -0400

I remember a voting day in Atlanta in the 1960s when the early results looked awful. A couple of my more experienced liberal Democratic friends said, “Don’t worry. The black boxes aren’t in yet.”
Having grown up in a segregated small south Georgia town, I had no idea what they meant. Turns out the votes of precincts that were mostly black hadn’t yet been counted. Thanks to the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act, blacks were casting ballots in record numbers.
I quickly learned that turning out those votes was one of the keys to victory. But segregation wasn’t dead. Most black women then worked as maids in white people’s homes. We went to black neighborhoods, drove them to the polls early in the morning and then delivered them to the “maids’ bus” they would take across town.
In the evening we took women who hadn’t yet voted from the downtown site where they changed buses to their polling place. Then we took them home. We also met black men at bus stops in their neighborhoods or outside the places they worked and got them to the polls and home.
Watching the gloomy election results last night I realized that many younger people don’t remember when ballots were on paper and deposited in boxes, which were then taken to the courthouse to be counted.
And, thank God, most of them don’t remember a day when blacks were completely segregated by neighborhood and had almost no opportunity for a life beyond working as a maid or janitor or in some other menial service job.
Because of their work schedules, they were always among the last people to get to their polling place so their votes were the last to be counted.
Not the good ole’ days.
But politics had more lessons for me that I didn’t learn in my hometown or even much-more-sophisticated Atlanta.
Working on the national staff of the McGovern campaign in 1972, I had the opportunity to participate in a few high-level meetings. In one of them, the conversation turned from the South to northern cities like Chicago and Detroit.
“The white ethnic vote will be essential,” one person said.
I was dumbfounded. What was a white ethnic? I had grown up in the black and white south and had no idea about cities that had Polish and Italian communities.
The McGovern campaign was also the source for a lesson I didn’t learn well. In those days there were no campaign finance laws and we relied on wealthy donors.
The senior campaign staff knew one of those rich folks was a friend of mine so the inevitable happened. They asked that I call him and ask for a donation. “We need a last-minute TV buy,” they said, a phrase well-known to anyone who’s worked in politics.
I protested that I had no idea how to ask for money but they assured me I could do it.
So I called my friend and told him very hesitantly that we hoped he could help out again. After commenting that he had been very generous, he said, “OK Bebe, I’ll do it for you. Will $3000 be enough?”
I was awed that someone would casually offer so much money and assured him we would be grateful and would not bother him again.
The senior staff folks buried their heads in their collective hands. They had thought $10,000 would be a good figure and knew that he would have given that much if I had asked him.
They didn’t ask me to raise money again.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Tue, 5 Oct 2010 17:01:56 -0400

How’s that for a cheery, zippy title?
Problem is, I apparently have PTSD. Like many other people, I thought of it as a disorder of soldiers who face horrible things in battle or people who suffer unspeakable traumas.
Turns out having a benign brain tumor that makes you sick for years and messes with your memory can provoke the same reaction.
The memory stuff is particularly to blame. I went into surgery four years ago essentially, you should pardon the expression, a vegetable. I woke up after the operation with my mind back, followed quickly by my sense of humor.
That was such a miracle that I was mostly overjoyed and tried to forget some of the awful times I had been through. Suicide attempts, for instance.
I was in the hospital in Nevada, where my son Alan lives, for a month and a rehab center for another month. I spent a few not-so-comfortable months living with people who rented to invalids or to more fortunate recovering folks like me.
Then I returned to Georgia and restarted my life in Columbus, where my son Don lives.
My sons were and are so helpful in my recovery. My brothers, Nelson and Olin, were and are, too. Other relatives were wonderfully attentive and caring.
My dearest friend stuck by me, calling me even when I couldn’t say a coherent sentence. She stayed in touch with many other friends, letting them know, first, of my increasing illness and then, with wonder, of my brain surgery and recovery.
So I had much to be thankful for.
But my short-term memory, which had been completely wiped out, slowly returned. In the first few months following surgery, I remembered some things that were very painful. That process continued for a couple of years.
But I soldiered on, just happy to be alive.
Memory can be tricky, though, startling you when you least expect it. I thought the moments when a sudden, terrible memory would make me gasp would stop after a while. And things did get better.
But here comes PTSD—which could also be called the cruelty of memory.
I began having recurrent thoughts about some of the awful times. Walking in the grocery store, I would almost double over with the misery and fear I had felt when I knew I was dying but didn’t know why. Trying to read, which has always been my retreat, I could see only visions of fear and confusion from the days I was the most sick.
Because depression—indescribable, completely debilitating depression—was my first and main brain tumor symptom, I spent several weeks in psychiatric hospitals in Georgia, Alabama and Nevada.
If you wonder how no one discovered the brain tumor in those settings, welcome to the club.
Actually, a neurologist in Alabama did, in 2002, but he told me not to worry about it. So I didn’t. If I ever warn you to question everything your doctor says and always to get second opinions, now you know why.
But back to PTSD.
I have had excellent medical care in my life, but I have also had the Alabama neurologist and a totally incompetent psychiatrist in Nevada. I acquired him because he was assigned to me when I was in an emergency room after trying to kill myself.
Some of my most terrifying memories are of hospitalizations under the care of that doctor, during which I got sicker and sicker. My stays in one Nevada psychiatric facility were especially unsettling.
It was there where my idiot psychiatrist finally asked a neurologist to examine me. That fabulous doctor discovered the tumor and saved my life.
That is a wonderful memory, but you don’t always get to choose what you will recall.
I did not choose the terrifying, disabling memories that recently virtually took over my life, but I thought I could deal with them.
You can imagine how. I spoke sternly to myself, very sternly. Reminded myself how lucky I am to be alive. Willed those devastating, intrusive thoughts to leave me alone.
Guess what. Those memories were a lot more powerful than my will.
I had stopped seeing my psychotherapist several months ago because I was doing so well. Ha!
That gap in care was all that the horrifying memories needed to move back in.
Finding myself barely able to function a few weeks ago, I called my therapist who welcomed me back. I am so fortunate.
She reminded me that she had mentioned PTSD a couple of years ago but I had rejected the diagnosis.
Talking with her over a couple of sessions about these memories has made a difference, and I will not so easily walk away from treatment again.
The therapist also does EMDR, a therapy for PTSD that I won’t even try to describe, but I recommend you research it if you or someone you love has PTSD. And don’t rush to tell me you don’t know anyone who suffers from it.
I would have assured you I didn’t until a few weeks ago when I could hardly drag myself out the door.
And, by the way—question everything your doctor says and always get second opinions.

A Funeral Trip and Pecans

Thu, 3 Jun 2010 20:20:57 -0400

When my mother’s fourth husband, Charlie, died, my brother Nelson and I went home to Americus for the funeral. Charlie’s niece and her husband came from Alabama and drove us all the way across Georgia to Waycross, Charlie’s hometown, for the service.
It was a long trip and the conversation was slow. Mama’s fourth marriage had not been her favorite, but we were still subdued at the loss. We also didn’t have a lot in common with the Alabama couple, but we knew they loved Mama and she loved them.
On the way back to Americus, Nelson asked them about the small-town store they owned.
They bought and sold pecans--by the bushel and truckload. As you can imagine from the cost of pecans in the supermarket, they made a ton of money.
Charlie’s relatives told us their store was in the middle of downtown. “The rest of the block is clothing stores. Jews own them,” the husband casually said.
Nelson and I were significantly taken aback. Had anti-Semitism suddenly raised its ugly head? The pecan store owner must have perceived some consternation in the back seat, so he continued.
“It’s OK,” he said. “We get along with them fine. Jews love pecans, you know.”
For all the decades since, “Jews love pecans, you know,” has been Nelson’s and my favorite statement when confronted by absurdity. It’s also a favorite comment of his Jewish wife.