Jack Kemp

I recently saw this article on Townhall.com that had some interesting information about female veterans' suicides. However, the author, Brianna Heldt, shows some significant "shade" (negative attitude) towards men in the third sentence of her piece. I did, however, pass this along to the woman who is the co-founder of the veterans charity Backpacks For Life, because the article had some good factual content. BackpacksforLife.org helps both male and female homeless veterans.

The author below, Brianna Heldt, says in the third sentence that male veterans "are ONLY 18 times more likely to kill themselves than their male civilian counterparts." It is one of the stupidest and most insensitive lines I've ever read in an article at a major website concerning ANY veterans' issues. Both the female and male veteran suicide rates must be addressed and brought down because both rates are a significant national problem. But her dismissing male veterans suicide rates as trivial compared to women's rates is appallingly callous. I can only characterize Bianna Heldt as a Female Chauvanist Sow with major not-so-hidden personal animosity towards the military. What if someone wrote an article saying that the highway accident death rate for a certain type of small car was "only" 18 times higher than that of the death rate for those driving Chevy cars? What sane, concerned author would take that number to be "acceptable?" The topics of veterans' suicides and women in combat is emotional enough with strong feeling and arguments on all sides without some writer raising the insult level by saying in the third sentence of an article that male veterans are "only" 18 times more likely to kill themselves than male civilians. Once again, if it weren't for the important facts and references (to other people's writings and organizations) in this article, I would have tossed it away.

And I must say that one of the reasons that male suicide rates in general are much higher than women's is that males live under pressure to be or possibly be in the future financial providers for homes at a time when many jobs have fled overseas or have been taken over by robots. Part of this is caused by men feeling they must solve all their problems by themselves, be they job or social role related, and not wanting to reach out for assistance. This is true in the military and outside of it. Women tend to form social relationships that support their emotional well being much easier than men, leading to their much lower civilian suicide rates. But when a woman enters the high stress do-or-die world of the military, particularly in a war zone, their Post Traumatic Stress and suicide rates increase significantly. If you have seen the documentary file "Lioness," about a group of women who accompanied male U.S. soldiers on house searches in the Middle East (doing body searches on local women for hidden arms). One woman soldier, on camera, told the story of her having to lift her M-16 rifle and shoot a Muslim insurgent who was about to shoot her, something she didn't think that she would have to do when she first signed up for military service. Yes, she wore a baggy pants combat uniform and had her hair up and looked like a short U.S. male soldier but I doubt if her being easily recognizeable at a distance as a female would have eliminated her problems on patrol.

Here's my concluding tip for Brianna Heldt. One does not gather support for lowering the very high women veterans' suicide rate (compared to female civilians) by dismissing male veterans suicides as trivial. One only creates a male backlash - and shows one's own ignorance. Or shows how well one has been indoctrinated in our schools and universities in an unreal view of a very real world.

Here's the article:

Female Veterans Face Higher Risk of Suicide

Brianna Heldt

It would appear that female veterans in America aren’t faring so well.

According to a recent NPR article, women who’ve served in combat are 250 times more likely than female civilians to commit suicide.

Male veterans, on the other hand, are only 18 times more likely to kill themselves than their male civilian counterparts.

What, exactly, is going on?

[...]

Nor can the VA be wholly responsible for the suicide rate among female veterans having increased by 85%--not an insignificant number, surely--in recent years. Why are women in combat doing so much worse, comparatively, than men? And what is the reason for the sudden, sharp increase?

If nothing else, the latest polls and research seem to validate something conservatives have been saying for a long time: men and women are indeed different.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs remains a convenient and expedient scapegoat, certainly, and not entirely without good reason. Just this past May, Forbes published a piece titled 3 Ways to Fix the VA Among Ongoing Scandals. The article describes woefully inadequate facilities and cites the 2014 scandal in particular, which erupted under the Obama administration, and where government officials allegedly falsified data showing just how long desperate veterans were waiting for appointments.

But the ongoing problems and corruption in the VA can’t fully explain the problem.

Read the rest!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:32 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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