This Fourth of July, Veterans Coming Home’s brilliant impact producer, Micael Bogar, wrote a powerful editorial for Yes Magazine. Kindling’s recent work on the military-civilian divide may seem a little off the beaten path from other issues we’ve taken on, but Micael’s piece, while in some respects very personal, discusses a framework called “moral injury,” which really speaks to the issues we are trying to address with Veterans Coming Home. 

Below is an excerpt, but we hope you’ll read the full editorial here.

I do think that many of us may be experiencing moral injury, just like our veterans. If you struggled at any point with our country going to war, you are probably struggling with it still. Civilians may have a hard time looking at veterans’ struggles because they force us to look at our own. And when it’s unpatriotic to be angry about the war, when we’re not allowed to express our feelings about the situation for fear of not supporting our troops, we feel trapped. If we’re going to be able to come together on this, we have to realize it’s not unpatriotic to have feelings and express them. How we express them is an entirely different thing.

You can read the full article here.