The Price for America
Rex Hauser
(On the steps of the Michigan State Capitol, March 14, 2025.
Veterans and friends from the Saginaw tribe of the Chippewa preceded my talk. Immediately before it, a representative of the Nokomis Center in Meridian Twp. and a rep of the above-named tribe performed a healing drum prayer. I offered everyone at the rally the chance to thank them in Ojibwe, with “Chi-Migwetch,” a very “big thanks,” which the crowd was happy to do.)
I am Rex Hauser, a Precinct Delegate from Mason, and a Blue Brigader. My wife and I have spent 13 years of our life supporting a soldier from the home front, so we know what it’s like to be part of military families, both the Air Force and the Army.
We are now, as a nation, all in a foxhole—not the kind that veterans have fought in but economically, and for services withheld, in a foxhole.
Throughout our history as a nation, the passions of war mount to a climax and we fight it and it goes away, usually after a victory, until lately. . . Sometimes it’s been the people who lead, as in the settlers who took over Native lands, and the government followed to put it on paper and make it supposedly legal. Other times it’s the government that leads, “for the national interest,” they say, and the people are expected to fall in line. (Vietnam, for instance.) Everything else in war falls in among these categories, and this describes the range of descriptions of the ways that wars mount up.
And what kinds of wars have we fought that were popular, or just? Not all of them. Look how long it took this country to get into WWII (and decide that to defeat fascism was doing the right thing).
Yet through our history, we can say that one constant of it is that veterans (those who gave their lives in one way or another) have always paid the price. Sometimes it’s glorified as the ultimate sacrifice, but there are those who disgracefully call “suckers and losers” those who tried valiantly, as heroically as anyone, but may have not succeeded. We all know who said that, someone with alleged bone spurs and five deferments and has a large, orange bouffant hairdo.
America can go ahead and believe that we can afford to be foolish or off the path of our ideals, forgetting representation or peace; or we forget the founding ideas of facing off with Satan and a mad King (key ideas of the Revolution). But history tells us, once again, that it is always veterans who always have paid the price. Always black and people of color veterans who paid the price and thus have defined the nation--- 5,000 Black troops in the Revolution, Black and people of color winning the Battle of New Orleans to finish our second war of Independence, in 1815. The Civil War fought with the power of 207,000 Black troops, and which couldn’t have been done without them. Tuskegee Airmen, Navajo code talkers, and so forth, into Nam and the Middle East. The folk holding the bag--- the rucksack, the duffel, IV bag, or the body bag--- is always the soldier, the paramedic, the pilot, and the nurse. They pay the real price of our existence, our beginnings, our survival, and our identity, despite the mistakes of the nation, all told. The mistakes, the hubris, and whatever, and we’re supposed to “fuggetaboutit”. You vets are often told to fuggetaboutit because we, the less committed, have already been “done with it” and moved on. How do you like that! In war after war, studying up on it doesn’t seem to do us any good, and hasn’t been enough.
Now the foolish and the misguided of this country seek even more use of the veteran, and then the investors can very possibly move in to privatize their care, so who can benefit!?? So who can we look forward to benefitting except the investors, under cheaper care, diminished accountability, at the price of reforms that the VA was going forward with. How do you like that!
Our friend Andrew, who served in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, was recently fired after two months work in service to vets, and has been diss-employed. Let me spell it our, first they diss you, disrespecting your record, and then they diss-employ you! Diss-employment is a new word for such a new, sad reality.
Though the courts are pushing back, and we hope that he (Andrew) gets his job back if he wants it. How do you like that? The trashing of our heroes, as in the trashing of so much in our lives now, with the T for Teflon, E for Elon, and V for Vance, T.E.V., the opposite of V.E.T., vets, the people who have given the most and been willing to serve and to die, thrown down by a careening ship of state, under the bus; under the helicopter, Barrett; where the Russian government becomes the model for using soldiers—we know what they do with them. The soldiers, living and dead, given up (as so often throughout our history) so that we don’t have to think and feel what they --- what you, the vets! (gesturing to the crowd)—have sacrificed and given with every ounce of nobility which is love.
V.E.T.: Valor, Excellence, Trust: because it’s what Vets do.
