By Steve Banko
Buffalo, NY – I recently heard the beliefs of a man I respect and admire in his "This I Believe" essay. But the more I thought about what fellow Vietnam veteran John McCain said, the more I wonder if he and I live in the same country. I was raised to believe in the virtues of the quiet hero Sen. McCain speaks about just as I was raised to believe in America: in her promise, in her opportunity, in her goodness.
And because I believed, I honored my end of the bargain with my country and I paid the blood tax that I recognized as part and parcel of my citizenship. Steeped in my belief in my country and mindful of the example of my father's generation, I paid that tax in the caldron of Vietnam. I answered a call the children of privilege ignored. It was a call I heard but barely understood. I bled and I suffered and I killed because my country said I should and I believed in America.
But Vietnam was the figurative drive-in backseat where I lost my innocence and where I abandoned my naivete. The theory of my America is much more pristine than her reality. I see an America that is far different than that John McCain's speaks of.
I see an America that sends her sons and daughters to fight and die for a lie. I see an America where quiet heroes earn 400 times less than the corporate CEOs. I see an America where health care is a luxury for most Americans.
I see an America where the minimum wage hasn't been raised in eight years, but where congressional salaries have been increased seven times.
I see an America where everything is for sale, including our government.
I see an America that makes nothing more than it makes deals, deals that have stolen the future from quiet heroes by breaking the promise of pension guarantees.
I see an America where the quality of education is based on the size of a property tax roll and not on the need of our students.
I see an America that my father and the others of his "greatest generation" would scarcely recognize. They fought and died to give my generation a better life than the one they had. They fought and they lived to extend the promise of opportunity to all of us. What has happened to that America? What has happened to its promise?
Vietnam left me with physical scars. I can deal with those. But the deceit and deception and the duplicity of those who sent me to Vietnam left psychic scars. They are much harder to deal with because they sustain my cynicism about the motives that make my government send the sons and daughters of the quiet heroes John McCain speaks of to pay the price for the believable myths of national furors and private enterprise.
Like Sen. McCain, I continue to serve and I try to believe but all that I know of war and all that I have heard of peace make me an expert in disbelief.
Listener-Commentator Steve Banko is field director for the Buffalo office of the U-S Department of Housing and Urban Development. He's a decorated Vietnam War veteran.