Scott Mann

I always feel like I'm out over my skis and there's somebody way better than me that should be doing this.

And I'm sure there are that should be.

But the reality is right now, we've got what we've got.

And we can either just sit dormant and hope it doesn't happen,

or we can actually start to engage each other at A, a community level, like you've talked about, in a collective fashion, and really start to look at it as a community problem.

But also, I mean, honestly, all you're calling your Congressman and demanding that this be a central issue in his or her campaign, you know, mobilizing people like you've done with a petition for town halls to get it added to the agenda of what politicians are talking about right now as part of their platform, I just, I'm not seeing it.

There's such an absence of kind of personal concern

for this issue.

You know, you kind of get the head nod, and wow, that's too bad, but it's like, man, have we really collectively forgotten that much since 9-11, 2001?

It's almost, it's hard to fathom, but it seems like we have.

Like, as a civil society, we've just literally erased our memory of it as if it never happened.

You know, and a whole generation of veterans are sitting here going, what the hell just, what was that?

You know, did it matter that I lost my friend over there or my wife to five deployments?

You know, it just, it's such a contrast, Sean.

And I think that's what bothers me more than anything is that you've got this little handful of veterans that are trying to stump the tub and sound the alarm, but a real absence of concern at the collective level.

And it's exhausting, honestly.

I want to go back to my job.

I want to go back to my nonprofit.

I want to go back to my life.

That's what one person said to me in our chat room about this.