Today is Veterans Day.
It’s a day off from school, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be thinking of school, or grading a paper here and there. Or planning my next lesson. Or wondering what I did right or wrong last week. When the school year is on, I’m on, even on weekends and holidays.
I have a newfound interest in Veterans Day. I’ve paid attention to this day in the past because I know veterans: my father was a veteran, and my aunt was a big deal in World War 2. I’ve also had tons of students involved in the military, along with friends and neighbors. There have been shows, movies, news items, history classes, and more that have presented information to me and millions of others. But it was through a familiar filter.
What brought my attention to veterans in a different way was not something I would have figured. Our family was traveling, we were watching television at the end of the day, and a NatGeo documentary on ayahuasca came on. It was Lisa Ling (formerly of the The View) and her series This is Life for the above-mentioned NatGeo, which, I suppose, gave the show extra credibility.
I was paying marginal attention to the show until a statistic was given–around 8,000 veterans commit suicide each year. I thought that was a horribly high number, designed to shock, or a manipulation of numbers. So I looked it up and found that the number was sadly accurate. I also found that there are 22 million veterans out of a population of 320 million in our country (as of 2014).
The documentary turned out to not only be about ayahuasca, but how veterans suffering from PTSD were going down to Peru to see if this drug derived from tree bark, along with the guidance of a shaman, could help them cope better. The veterans interviewed claimed that they had made great strides in coping with their anger, with their PTSD, with their depression, and the fact that when they closed their eyes to sleep at night their brains kept producing images that didn’t allow them to rest. This was an everyday occurrence, long after these men and women stopped serving.
I can “turn off” teaching when I need to. My “struggle” during the school year is minimal in comparison to others. There’s a world out there that I don’t understand, or that I have only been exposed to in small doses, but it does exist.
Life is not short–there’s always time for change and to enter new circles. I can’t put myself in the shoes of most veterans, but this day means more than just a day off school.