This Wednesday, September 26, our guest on the Peace and Justice Report will be veteran Herald-Tribune reporter Billy Cox. Billy will talk about his series in the paper “Warriors Rise Up.” Read all of it at rxforveterans.com.
Billy writes “In June 2018, the Department of Veterans Affairs Suicide Report indicated that more than 75,000 Americans with military backgrounds became suicides from 2005-2015. At 20.6 deaths a day, that’s nearly 20,000 more than were killed during the 16 years of war in Vietnam.” We’ll talk about this epidemic and some possible solutions. Of those daily tallies, 3.8 were still in uniform. Which means that over that 10-year stretch, the Pentagon lost 13,870 active duty troops to self-inflicted wounds, nearly twice the number who’ve died in combat since the 9/11 terror attacks.”
What the survivors want is not more pills but access to relief through cannabinoids without penalty and to “expose and crush the longest-running lie in American health care — the classification of marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug with zero medicinal value.”
In the second half of the program we’ll talk to Joe Fahey, Ph.D., Chair, Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice www.cswj.us. Joe worked on a book by a Medal of Honor winner who renounced the Medal after he joined the peace movement. He was Charlie Liteky, a Catholic military chaplain, who received the Medal in 1968. It is a story that is now in his book, Renunciation: My Pilgrimage from Catholic military chaplain, Vietnam hawk and Medal of Honor Recipient to civilian warrior for peace. Joe is also a retired professor of religious studies, Manhattan College and author of War and the Christian Conscience: Where Do You Stand?.
Joseph J. Fahey, Ph.D.
Chair, Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice www.cswj.us
Retired Professor of Religious Studies, Manhattan College
Author: War and the Christian Conscience: Where Do You Stand? (Orbis Books)