My comments on Compassion Deficit Disorder article

I have to agree with Judith Warner that there is a malady impacting the peoples of our nation. Defining it as compassion deficit disorder may be a good way of handling this insidious malaise.

However, as a member of a military family, I see the impacts of CDD differently. Can you believe that there are peoples of this nation that believe the war in Iraq is over? Denial can lead to self-deception.

The majority of the nation does not understand what a military family has to endure when their loved one is desployed. I don't mean loneliness. I mean the economic impacts, parental responsibilities of a single-headed household, the anxiety involved with knowing your spouse is in a warzone and so on and so on.

There might be family members in the next room yet a military wife feels isolation that only the return of her husband can cure. The hope is that he returns complete of his faculties and abilities to help with the two children both under 14 months.

These military family members go to church, go shopping, live among us. Their children are cute and healthy. We don't know their stories. What's worse is that as a nation we don't want to know.

In my family, the race card is constantly "played" but not to get anything. My family has a deck that has one card with brown colored skin, another card with not-perfect English, another card with immigration issues pending and one last card with brown skinned babies. Try getting the best quality of care for your premature born kids when you can't best communicate. Try having to automatically prove yourself as a documented resident for every single thing just because you are brown and have an accent.

Compassion deficit disorder lives not just among those born with best skin shade. It exists among the non-Anglo peoples as well. Those born in the US accuse those born outside of the US taking their jobs, benefits, opportunities. Those born in the US have no compassion for peoples who literally crossed a river or border or ocean to leave behind war, poverty and malnutrition to come to the US.

As my nephew cooks (that's his M.O.S) and fights his way at the Afghanistan / Pakistan border, he serves a nation who peoples ignore the existance and many of the needs of his wife and children that he's left behind.