It’s that time of year again when television spectator sports — between professional football, regular season college basketball and March Madness — are in a wintry heyday.
At many of these games, America’s service members are asked to make an appearance, coming down to the court before tipoffs and at halftimes; in many ways, this is a nice gesture to show some small appreciation for their sacrifices.
However, this gesture seems more like a farce if U.S. troops are used as props at sporting events, while the general public seems to ignore the problems faced by veterans returning home and the grave danger facing U.S. service members whenever Washington deploys them abroad. The shiny veneer of these momentary outpourings of mass-patriotism, and the glamorization of war and conflict in our broader culture, should not mask the difficult — and too often unaddressed — issues facing our troops as a result of Washington’s dangerous militarism.
While having respect and thanks for America’s individual military servicepeople and veterans is certainly important and admirable, the idolatrous worship of the military as an institution at sporting events presents an action-movie, romanticized view of war that belies the deep mental and physical wounds facing many veterans in the aftermath of the nearly half-dozen Middle Eastern conflicts in which the government has heedlessly involved our country.
American veterans face a suicide and mental health pandemic, suffering suicide at rates 50 percent higher than civilians. The government has stopped releasing concrete records on the disturbingly high number of American soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, but veteran advocates estimate that in over a decade-and-a-half of war, one million American soldiers have been injured in combat. The scars many veterans face are the inevitable result of repeated, seemingly endless deployments in hellish warzones around the world.
It is not enough to offer empty, momentary praise to America’s military without having a real conversation about whether it is prudent and absolutely necessary for American troops to be engaged (and endangered) in faraway, unconstitutional conflicts that always seem to backfire.
A better way to truly appreciate and thank America’s military, rather than using them as a spectacle to arouse cheers from the crowd, would be to utilize the First Amendment rights our troops protect and have a more honest conversation — and a real national debate — about whether it is necessary for American soldiers to have to risk life, limb and trauma in unending and counterproductive wars half the world away. Americans should remember these real and immense costs of war, and those who bear them, when they look down at the young Americans in uniform standing on the basketball hardwood and grassy football fields at events held for their own entertainment.
For every time America’s servicepeople were features at sporting events, how many honest debates were had around American dinner tables?
After President Barack Obama betrayed his promises to scale back U.S. wars in the Middle East, Americans became desensitized to the endless conflict in which our government involves our country, and as a result, have come to see the spiritual and physical mutilation of American soldiers as almost normal — and discussion about this reality seems almost uncomfortable.
