The Culture of a National Service Plan: Cultural Crossover

For public Release:

critical analysis in preservation of Nation. Remembering who is being spent on these missions.

House Committees Senate Committees Find my Representative Find my Senator
Veterans and their family members who wish to contact the Department regarding a claim, benefits, or services, may call VA Toll-Free at 1 (800) 827-1000 or 1 (800) 829-4833 [TDD], or Contact the VA via the web.

Service is our standard

In approaching tomorrow, approach it with humility America has within its population those who still rise each day to bare our standard for us. Though we may disagree on that task.

Service is our standard. Awake this morning knowing while you and I slept, one of our kind – America as a world citizen in the pursuit of peace and freedoms - will never awake, never returns to that which filled their collective being with love, with purpose, with joy.

The President elect announces re-launching The National Service Plan in creating a vested, true diverse ownership in the American Society. Service removes race from racism - becoming the only color whose stars and stripes run true.

Demand no less for the future. Those disavowing service are impostering lurkers among us grabbing at the mantle of power – blindly robbing the future of our collective promise. Service is our standard.

"Someone waved a flag today. Others on our behalf are being laid beneath one".

Copyright 2008: Skinny T. @ The Network

House Committees Senate Committees Find my Representative Find my SenatorVeterans and their family members who wish to contact the Department regarding a claim, benefits, or services, may call VA Toll-Free at 1 (800) 827-1000 or 1 (800) 829-4833 [TDD], or Contact the VA via the web.

Batting 1500

For so many veterans – they survived the war to end up broken and homeless back on our own streets – hulkering shadows of the past who just won’t go away – no matter how many hail Mary’s or some favor called charity; a 'gift' rumored not from the people, but to those they prayed with - food doled out as some token of thier service?

The 1,500:

"For as long as the United States has sent its young men - and later its young women - off to war, it has watched as a segment of them come home and lose the battle with their own memories, their own scars, and wind up without homes.

• The Civil War produced thousands of wandering veterans. Frequently addicted to morphine, they were known as "tramps," searching for jobs and, in many cases, literally still tending their wounds.
  
• More than a decade after the end of World War I, the "Bonus Army" descended on Washington - demanding immediate payment on benefits that had been promised to them, but payable years later - and were routed by the U.S. military.


• And, most publicly and perhaps most painfully, there was Vietnam: Tens of thousands of war-weary veterans, infamously rejected or forgotten by many of their own fellow citizens.
  

Now it is happening again, in small but growing numbers. For now, about 1,500 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have been identified by the Department of Veterans Affairs. About 400 of them have taken part in VA programs designed to target homelessness.

The 1,500 are a small, young segment of an estimated 336,000 veterans in the United States who were homeless at some point in 2006"[1] - Erin McClam, AP National Writer

The Network

We are America, world citizen

"As a soldier, I have a duty to obey the orders of the President of the United States as long as they are Constitutional. I can no more opt out of missions I disagree with than I can ignore laws I think are improper.

I do not consider it a violation of my individual rights to have gone to Iraq on orders because I raised my right hand and volunteered to join the army. Whether or not this mission was a good one, my participation in it was an affirmation of something I consider quite necessary to society.

So if nothing else, I gave my life for a pretty important principle; I can (if you'll pardon the pun) live with that".[2] - Major Andrew Olmsted (1970 - 2008)

Nam Duex Bien Phu (way more broken)

Who is this apologetic crowd defining for veterans their place in contract access, lining them up like the ‘money in the bank health-care doping scheme concentration camp survivors’ - under a banner of private health care?

Is there no end to the a lineup of corporate panoplies wanting to perform "Help" contracting on the medication and convalescent side of things?

Where is the wholesale arm of support back to those who went, those who return and most critically – the fact these PRIMES require economics over pills and doping regiments preparing them for the mean streets of the US where they will be, historically, Conveniently Forgotten - to join with the 400,000 homeless vets 'convelescing' on the streets from America's shallow memory?

Where is the economic impetus as payment for the deeds rendered on your behalf while fortunes were made and the value of life depreciated? Vic, after much pause, entreats this audience today: 'Will the real We the People please stand up?'

Thank god it’s at least you Casey & Olmsted. You look larger in death than ever in life before this? Why are you so much larger now, brighter, a better focus on the cost of service to humanity in the face of the shenanigans and foolery? How is it so aptly in life as in death - you defined how humans should comport themselves each day - people who exemplar something singing service out loud -- not as duty - but as routine!

What’s that you say...? Serve to make this idea of peace and freedom for humankind – something reflected in what we do, each and every day? Roger that, Captain. I read about you and what you lived for. It makes me long for that place you call Dellens - to find at once such place made on earth - so it is no longer the dream we speak, but the life each one of us may live. It should be ever more common among our kind.


Isn't this what you made your life about - what you lived for, Sir...? You are a world citizen, and Babylon 5 rocks.

VLOG ME

WTF-over. Victor Echo Tango: Olmsted, Casey.

Olmsted, 38, dies in Iraqi ambush; 1st casualty of '08 see - David Montero, Rocky Mountain News: [1]

As I wrote the last lines in the Christmas Eve Vlog, never would I believe one of our own – both an officer and a blogger, Maj. Andrew Olmsted, 38, and Cpt. Thomas J. Casey, 32, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, to become the first casualties - by ambush - in '08?

Ironically, the Major enjoyed the distinction of being named one of the militaries TOP bloggers. He also wrote a parting piece found here: FInal Post

• "I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn't a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. If you think the U.S. should stay in Iraq, don't drag me into it by claiming that somehow my death demands us staying in Iraq," he wrote. "If you think the U.S. ought to get out tomorrow, don't cite my name as an example of someone's life who was wasted by our mission in Iraq. – Major Olmsted.[1]

"And maybe now it's your turn to die kicking some ass." Freedom Isn't Free: Team America

So who are we as a people – all of us? I hope for the Majors sake, he finds that which he spoke in his last letter to his loved one. Casey and Olmsted – both Loadstars, perhaps referenced as G'kar and his Captain? Both now loaded and Sirius bound to where the scroll of our deeds on this place - are now again presented by those who lived among us as loadestars - true citizens of comportment on our field. They are found acceptable: Major Andrew Olmsted. Captain Thomas Casey. Earlier I had wondered about the ones we lose, as a part of what is this idea of ‘the rest of us’ in us all.

When we think ill of our country? When we think ill of each other? When the next time we feel we may yell as scream to hear out the scrolls of the names of our dead - speak the Name Major Olmsted or Captain Casey in its stead.

You speak Peace? It is still brought only by service within us all - by those truly as Olmsted and Casey whom served - especially those whose wings are Phobos and Deimos chasing Mars.

Today – the Network is the fabric of those who carry hope for us still - each one of us. In all of us – pressed and folded further into the service of humankind – serving an ability to record history – to keep our record alive. Our victory is not that we know the end. When we see ourselves lining up with the long cast shadows of our lifelong struggles – how we met face to face in the times of great struggle defines us.

As if those who die in this conflict journey there not having known the cliche' of life as not always fair? Sell Smeltown Pie town somewhere else.

• "We're all going to die of something. I died doing a job I loved. When your time comes, I hope you are as fortunate as I was.." - Andrew Olmsted, World Citizen.
  

That is what defines these I write - being as beings, above the crowd – marking those whom serve the exemplar citizen are shadows cast brighter, further, longer still. So go now remembering words that had lived in this world citizen.

Vlog's prayer for these this day:

Be still my heart this night - Phobos and Deimos with wings upon your feet come to claim these souls who no longer look nor wait for sleep. We now wait for the hand of hope. Even crooked hope -- to shine beyond the loss of these now gone.

Amen.

Vets Punked in Federal Contracting

And too, are vets again the ‘chits’ gathered in state and federal places of legislative grunk churned out in favor of whom: in many instances, veterans appear to be at the back-a-da-bus. Even in federal contracting, veterans are pitted against other veterans based upon race and gender – as if all that is served for in this great republic is again reduced to the feel-good bubble-gum lottery breakdown of division by race and gender – whose game is it anyway? Being a Veteran takes the race out of racism, becoming the only color that runs true...

From back-deal rooms in federal contracting favoring race and gender above service as the pretext of equality – especially within the DOD’s own facilities (see December ’08 Vetrepreneur stats “2027 – The Year of the Service Disabled Veteran Business”) – to the non-compliant VA HCA’s and their contracting subordinate – it is again the expiration of a contract made with those who serve, those who return?

Victory Now. Victory Tommorrow. Victory kiss the hand of peace.

Vic.