| 摘要 | Chairman Levin, Ranking Member Bilirakis, and distinguished members of this subcommittee: Thank you for the opportunity to appear here today, as you consider how to leverage the tremendous power of Congress and the United States toward uplifting our veterans in their transition from war to work and successful civilian lives. It is an honor.
Caring for military veterans’ well-being has been the genuine concern of the American public, lawmakers, and veterans’ advocates following every armed conflict in which the US has engaged. Recognizing how the nation ought to deliver that care has simultaneously been its most consistent challenge.
America’s veterans face three significant challenges in their post-service transition: procuring employment, accessing the education or training associated with particular civilian occupations, and overcoming the “broken veteran” narrative.
Veterans’ transition stress is often mistaken and mischaracterized as a grave mental health disorder, feeding the “broken veteran” narrative. Legislation geared only toward veteran suicide unconsciously perpetuates this image. Reformulating veteran legislation in the positive language of economic opportunity, however, emphasizes post-service growth. Congress can instigate this through creating a Veterans Economic Opportunity Administration, which would benefit veterans, the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA), Congress, military recruitment efforts, and all of society.
A Public Trust, Challenged I would like to share two quotes with you, separated by nearly a century, one from a US president and one from a Veterans Board of Appeals lawyer. They express two distinctive but accurate sentiments about America’s enduring attitude toward veterans and the system of laws that shape how America actually cares for veterans through the VA and other related agencies. In 1918, in a Christmas letter to soldiers at Walter Reed hospital, President Woodrow Wilson echoed a long line of American sentiment, stretching back to Abraham Lincoln’s words in his Second Inaugural (which later became the VA’s motto) to “care for him who shall have born the battle, and for his widow and his orphan.” Wilson intoned: “The nation has no more solemn obligation than healing the hurts of our wounded.” Americans are conscientious—some may say even sentimental—about the nation’s duty and obligation to care for veterans.
Almost as a corrective to that soaring rhetoric, in 2011, scholar James Ridgeway observed in the Veterans Law Review: “It should not be assumed that historical artifacts of veterans’ law—no matter how entrenched—exist to benefit veterans. Rather every piece must be examined in a historical context.”
There are no two better quotes to illustrate how the American public in general, and its elected politicians in particular, genuinely feel about veterans—but also how and why that care seems so often to fall short of the noble ideal in practice.
At the American Enterprise Institute here in DC, I work with the Program on American Citizenship, which is focused on the fundamental principles and challenges of a free society. We believe, in the words of Walter Berns, one of our late, great scholars of the Constitution (and a veteran), that, among other things:
Understanding how public sentiment and public policies can go hand in hand but so often be at loggerheads is something we investigate deeply. We look at both the formal and informal institutions of government, as well as how individuals are educated about them and how they understand them, to grasp the dynamics of our cultural and public policy challenges and to present solutions with “teeth in them” that truly improve the lives of flesh-and-blood human beings.
We research civic education and the status of that in our schools, but we also research civil society; the professions and civil society—such as the medical, law, military, and musical professions—and how they strengthen democracy; what they contribute to the virtues of a free society whose disparate parts must still communicate with each other; the civil-military divide; and, thus importantly, veterans and society. This multidisciplinary approach gives us a wealth of insight into the challenges of maintaining a professional all-volunteer force in a diverse society, in which increasingly few have any connection to even the idea of military service (because of the lack of K–12 civic education and a geographically sparse ROTC presence), let alone know a current or former member of the Armed Services. |
