The significance of Wednesday’s Veterans Day remains
profound. Americans still fight and die abroad, and those
who return bear the physical and emotional costs of their
work. Truly honoring these Americans is at times obscured
by stumping and jingoist pageantry, as well as misplaced
protest. It is clarifying to recognize that at its essence, the day
is about America’s proudest sacrifices, about its people—as
well the weight of our most dreadful political errors, our
worst scars. This season’s tug-of-war over health care shows,
again, that Americans do not agree on details, nor did we
ever. We cannot expect to. But there is a unifying idea behind
Veterans Day: improving the quality of life for all Americans
must inspire our actions.
Earlier this week, Governor Don Carcieri vetoed a bill
that would have granted Rhode Island’s same-sex “domestic
partners” the right to arrange each other’s funerals, a right
currently reserved for heterosexual married couples. Made so
close to Veterans Day, the denial of basic family rights to a
group of this state’s citizens seems all the less patriotic.
On the same day of Carcieri’s veto, the Harvard Medical
School released a study that calculated that 2,266 veterans
under 65 years of age died in 2008 because they did not
have health insurance. The study reports that this figure is
“more than 14 times the number of deaths (155) suffered
by US troops in Afghanistan in 2008, and more than twice
as many as have died (911)…since the war began in 2001.”
That translates to an average of six deaths each day as a result
of reduced access to health care.
To honor—and justify—veterans’ enormous contribu-
tions to each American’s wellbeing, our politics must be
guided by improving each citizen’s quality of life. That quality
of life hinges on two fundamental issues: the right to health
and the right to family. These rights are not fundamental for
a select few, but for all of us.
KSO