Very cute 😺

This is such a low effort response that showcases US apathy for it’s own poverty conditions. Of the $75.4 billion sent to Ukraine alone, only $26.4 billion was financial (loans, funds, other financial support), and on top of that only $2.7 billion is used for humanitarian purposes like food, healthcare, etc). The remaining $46.3 billion is reflected as military spending towards weapons and equipment, security training, grants and loans for weapons, etc, all of which is covered from our $800 billion dollar “defense” budget.

So now that we’ve addressed your concerns about how tax dollars fund military spending, I ask again, do you honestly believe that there is a higher priority to spend large sums of money in the form of aid to other countries rather than focusing on the material issues we face as a nation?

Why should we send 74 billion in aid to Israel and Ukraine when 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, we are the only OECD nation without some form of universal healthcare, and over 650,000 Americans are homeless (a 12 percent increase during 2023). Do you honestly believe that there is a higher priority to send obscenely large sums of money in the form of aid to other countries rather than focusing on the material issues we face as a nation?

Not all vets have seen combat, even if they have deployed. But aside from that most of these vets were early 20s that did one enlistment and are fresh out of active, so their life experience up until that point was high school to military to college. Not all of them, but a significant amount. That being said, even at the time I would’ve found the absurd response funny, except it meant more work for me that week to draft communication on behalf of the office.

I love this story. We have preventive measures in place because of chaos like this. Back in the early 2010s I was doing a VA internship at my college’s Veterans Affairs office. We would help other veteran students manage their GI Bill and other VA benefits as well as communicate events for our student vet community. The school used a student veteran distribution list just like this story but for a much smaller group of users.

One day the college’s VA office sent out an email that a prominent anti war vet was coming to speak at the college which sparked a lot of controversy apparently with a good portion of the members of that DL. So much so that a reply all chain began and my student email inbox was blowing up from all the outrage. If I remember correctly, the event was ultimately canceled because so many student veterans were complaining.