Veterans in Crisis

CW: suicide rates

A sad female soldier wearing a camouflage t-shirt and sitting in a living room.

Author illustration from original AI-generated image (Imagen 3)

In addition to Elon Musk’s current net worth of roughly $420 billion (as mentioned in the previous post), Musk is making an estimated $8 million per day from government contracts alone.

That’s $2.9 BILLION annually, just in government contracts.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) laid off 1,000 employees a few days ago as part of the dodgy DOGE goons’ purge of “wasteful” spending, and with the hook-jab sucker punch of the federal hiring freeze plus return-to-office mandate, there won’t be any replacements for Veterans Crisis Line (VCL) staffers.

All VCL employees have been on mandatory telework since 2022, and many of them live hundreds of miles from the nearest VA clinic or hospital, much less the call center’s main hub in Atlanta. There isn’t an office for most of them to return to.

The VCL manages about 60,000 calls per month. The VA estimates that 17 veterans take their own lives every day. Even one would be too many, but even more sadly, a study conducted by America’s Warrior Partnership and Duke University found that many such suicides are underreported, putting the estimate in the low 20s. Furthermore, the VA’s figures do not include “self-injury mortality” for fatalities caused by overdose and other forms of self-harm.

This puts the more realistic estimate at 40-44 each day.

So, the feds apparently cannot afford to keep VA hospitals & clinics and the VCL fully staffed, but it can afford to keep padding the pockets of the world’s wealthiest con artist and Mitläufer. (At least the State Department appears to have withdrawn its procurement plan to spend $400 million on armored dumpster-mobiles – er, I mean, Cybertrucks.)

 

 

Please, if you’re a Veteran in crisis, contact the Veterans Crisis Line to receive 24/7 confidential support. Dial 988 then Press 1, chat online at VeteransCrisisLine.net/Chat, or text 838255.

You matter. Please stay.

 


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