*A discussion with another military spouse about how her kids survived on pizza bagels and carrot sticks at the end of a deployment helped to make me feel a little better.
But I'm going to write about something that has been on my mind in between all of these other events:
And that is: fluff versus fixes.
From the news, and not the stuff on the front page, or second page, or third page, I get the impression we are (read: military families and our service members) sitting on a teeter toter that I am watching dip toward some scary situations.
As many other important stories also do, our military family news slips to the back of the newspaper or lower links on a news site. However, with this resurgance of interest in military families and the implementation of PSAs and programs to educate the general public, I wonder if there is too much fluff (which I will purposefully not define) and not enough fixes when it comes to addressing military family issues. And, with that, I hear no one in our community questioning this..even our military spouses, even in the blogging community. Instead, we seem to talk a lot about the fluff (read: whipped topping that sits on top of something to make it look better).
Why don't we talk about the issues that are impacting our community? Why don't we rally around improving these problems? Why are we so silent? Is the fluff enough?
Personally, I abhor the term: The Silent Ranks when describing military spouses.
Would a civilian spouse be quiet if her house was full of mold? Would a civilian mother stand by and watch problems at her child's school without organizing to fix it? Would a cilivian woman go to the same doctor that had failed her ten times before without saying "something is wrong here?"
Speaking doesn't have to equal complaining. Collective voices doesn't have to mean collective whining.
Yes, too often, we are silent. Maybe making individual "complaints" but is there more than a collective sigh?
Which elicits a big response. And change. But what if the conversation came from more...more of us? Do you think we're talking enough about the important issues...or too much about the fluff.
What is keeping us so silent? Why aren't we standing up together?
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