This Veterans Day, Americans will thank veterans for their service — and then go back to ignoring what their government did to them. The men who bled for this country deserve more than platitudes from the same establishment that shipped them off to foreign interventions with no defined exit and no clear American interest, then left them to navigate the wreckage at home.
The Austin Daily Herald gets part of the equation right: Veterans Day is a chance to "sit with them, talk with them and learn from them," not just offer hollow gratitude. Pacelli Catholic Schools in Austin, Minnesota, hosts a program Wednesday at 1:30 p.m. in All Saints Arena where students and the public can hear directly from the people who lived it. This year's guest is Father Jim Starasinich of Queen of Angels Catholic Church — faith and duty, together, as it should be. Pacelli social studies teacher Tiffany Oeltjen told the Herald the program is "about the impact that veterans have had on their country and the freedoms we have because of their bravery" — including what veterans do "when it's not in war time." The Herald notes, correctly, that for many veterans, "it's not so easy to tell these stories."
No kidding. The Reading Eagle, meanwhile, offers the official Washington version of gratitude: a National Veterans Small Business Week celebration attended by Vice President JD Vance, SBA chief Kelly Loeffler, VA Secretary Doug Collins, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. The piece reads like an SBA press release — and maybe it is. It touts $1.3 trillion in annual sales from 1.8 million veteran-owned small businesses, $258 billion in payroll, and over 4 million Americans employed. The SBA cleared an inherited VetCert backlog of more than 2,700 cases, bringing processing time to 12 days. Nearly $5 million in grants for new Veterans Business Outreach Centers, $3.75 million for federal contracting access, and over $1 million for defense industrial base training. Good. But the Reading Eagle buries the real story: why did that backlog exist in the first place? Who created the system veterans now have to navigate?
Both outlets honor veterans. Neither asks the question that matters: who sent them, and why? The Austin Daily Herald acknowledges some served "by draft" — conscripted by the same government now offering them a 12-day processing time on a certification. The Reading Eagle frames veteran entrepreneurship as feeding the "defense industrial base" — the same apparatus that generates the interventions veterans are still paying for.
Veterans built this country. They also carry its failures. The men who came home from wars with no exit strategy deserve more than ceremonies and SBA grants — they deserve leaders who stop sending the next generation into fights that don't serve the Americans who fight them.
