Do veterans deserve to be stuck with the "homeless vet" stereotype?

SGM (Join to see), that is a troubling stereotype. I guess all stereotypes are inherently not so good, but veterans are taking it on the chin - both ways, negative (homeless) and positive (successful businessman).

What do we do to change it? I guess we work hard to be successful and prove the stereotypes wrong. That and some PR by veteran organizations and the DoD, VA, etc., maybe?

I have seen both ends of the spectrum, Vets who truly need the help and vets who abuse the system. What the majority of the public sees are the ones who abuse the system as the ones who do not abuse the system try their best to look normal out of shame and the reactions they get from civilians.

The stereotype will be there so long as there are "Rudy's" standing on street corners like this individual here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/19/rudy-fake-homeless-vet_n_3623991.html

It is these people that make it harder for actual veterans to be taken seriously. Whip out a "I'm a veteran" sign, everyone feels some sense of empathy for them. However some people like me will go out of their way to see if they're a veteran or not, and I usually get the same story, 'I was 82nd, 101st, SF, Ranger, Seal, infantry ranger and so on and it doesn't stop there. I will publicly shame them, on the spot, I'll ask to see their VA card, if not, I'll offer them a ride and get them to a VA hospital get them registered and get them some services if possible, and what do you know they start back peddling, they start making all kinds of excuses. At that point I have no pity for them. I will shame them on the spot, I have no shame in my game.

Call me insensitive, heartless or what not, but I have the ability to detach very easily and it doesn't bother my sleep at night when I confront these sign holding fake vets. Now on the other hand, I have come across REAL homeless vets, and the stories they tell send chills through my titanium spine. Some of them are homeless because the VA system has failed them and all the government can do is apply a band-aid hoping the problem will go away. Yes, that's right, some have chosen that life, its because its the only life they've ever known when a society as advanced as ours sees them as meaningless. No not all vets are homeless, but they're just as lost, discarded as seemingly worthless by the same system that was to take care of them.

"You can quickly learn two things about the homeless. First, you can learn that many of the homeless, before they were homeless, were people more or less like ourselves: members of the working or middle class. And you can learn that the world of the homeless has its roots in various policies, events, and ways of life for which some of us are responsible and from which some of us actually prosper. We decide, as a people, to go to war, we ask our children to kill and to die, and the result, years later, is grown men & women homeless on the street. We change, with the best intentions, the laws pertaining to the mentally ill, and then, without intention, neglect to provide them with services; and the result, in our streets, drives some of us crazy with rage. We cut taxes and prune budgets, we modernize industry and shift the balance of trade, and the result of all these actions and errors can be read, sleeping form by sleeping form, on our city streets. The liberals cannot blame the conservatives. The conservatives cannot blame the liberals. Homelessness is the sum total of our dreams, policies, intentions, errors, omissions, cruelties, kindnesses, all of it recorded, in flesh, in the life of the streets."-P.M.

The fact is, many of the homeless are not only hapless victims but voluntary exiles, "domestic refugees," people who have turned not against life itself but against us, our life, American life. Look for a moment at the vets. The price of returning to America was to forget what they had seen or learned in Vietnam, to "put it behind them." But some could not do that, and the stress of trying showed up as alcoholism, broken marriages, drug addiction, crime. And it showed up too as life on the street, which was for some vets a desperate choice made in the name of life - the best they could manage. It was a way of avoiding what might have occurred had they stayed where they were: suicide, or violence done to others. Whats troubling even more its happening to our own since the Gulf War, OEF and OIF. I mean there's only what a 10 year age difference between those wars. With the current 9/11 veterans, media just keeps pumping the stereotypes, if there's a mass shooting, "was he a veteran?" was are recent one. "oh you were in Iraq, you must have that PTSD thing then, can't you take some pills to cure it?" and there's many more...

We like to think, in America, that everything is redeemable, that everything broken can be magically made whole again, and that what has been "dirtied" can be cleansed. Recently I saw on television that one of the soaps had introduced the character of a homeless old woman. A woman in her thirties discovers that her long-lost mother has appeared in town, on the streets. After much searching the mother is located and identified and embraced; and then she is scrubbed and dressed in style, restored in a matter of days to her former upper-class habits and role. Yes, many of those on the streets could be transformed, rehabilitated. But there are others whose lives have been irrevocably changed, damaged beyond repair, and who no longer want help, who no longer recognize the need for help, and whose experience in our world has made them want only to be left alone.

Pavlov, once theorized that the two most fundamental reflexes in all animals, including humans, are those involving freedom and orientation. Grab any animal, he said, and it will immediately struggle to accomplish two things: to break free and to orient itself. And this is what one sees in so many of the homeless. Having been stripped of all other forms of connection, and of most kinds of social identity, they are left only with this: the raw stuff of nature, something encoded in the cells - the desire to be free, the need for familiar space. Perhaps this is why so many of them struggle so vehemently against us when we offer them aid. They are clinging to their freedom and their space, and they do not believe that this is what we, with our programs and our shelters, mean to allow them.

I apologize for the rant, sometimes my emotions come through.