Posted on 07/05/2007 3:40:34 AM PDT by Clive
The bitterness of poverty and shame, of 60 years of fighting, cut even sharper yesterday for families of Canada's disabled world war veterans.
They issued an angry warning to the rest of Canada mourning the latest deaths of soldiers serving the cause.
"This is our country. We will do it again," said Lenore Majoros of Woodstock.
"It is so wrong. I am a little angry, but not surprised."
Her uncle, Joe Authorson, returned from the Second World War shell-shocked and schizophrenic. He spent most of his life in a psychiatric ward.
Then he showed up at a family funeral in 1997 in shabby clothes.
That prompted Majoros to wonder where his pension had gone.
Majoros learned Veterans Affairs hadn't paid a penny of interest on her uncle's pension since it began managing his money in the 1950s.
In Authorson's name, a class-action lawsuit was launched against the federal government in 1999.
Authorson died in 2002, but in 2005 a lower court awarded $4.6 billion in damages to the families of disabled war vets.
Yesterday, the Ontario Court of Appeal -- the province's highest court -- overturned that decision, leaving the families with nothing.
"I didn't need the money but I did need to see a wrong corrected," Majoros said.
"It never will get corrected and I am bitter about that."
Yesterday's court decision came as six more Canadian soldiers died in Afghanistan.
"Everywhere I go I see, 'support the troops, support the troops.' It is a farce," said Authorson's nephew, Peter Mountney of Bancroft.
"People are jumping on the bandwagon but they don't support the ones who were left in rooms drooling after the Second World War. These guys are the troops."
Thirty years from now, the families of soldiers killed or damaged in Afghanistan will face the same fight, Majoros said.
She's especially angry some critics of the lawsuit have tried to portray her and other soldiers' families as money-grabbing, distant relatives.
"How pathetic," she said.
Other families were counting on the Conservative government to do the right thing after years of neglect by the former Liberal government
"Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he would always be there for the troops. He's not. It's so discouraging," said a Nova Scotia woman, who asked to remain anonymous.
Her father, a private in the Second World War, came back an abusive alcoholic who sent his family into a downward spiral of poverty, she said.
The government offered no help and mismanaged his pension, she said.
"These are men who put their lives on the line and came back never the same and their families suffered," she said.
"The government really hurt us kids. We could have done a lot more. We could have got educations."
She's ready to give up.
"What can you do? You are just left with bitterness in you."
A London son of a disabled veteran said he wasn't surprised the government got off the hook.
"It was a lot of money."
His father spent years in a psychiatric institution after fighting in the Second World War. The government barely gave his family enough to survive, said the man, who asked his name not be used.
The Last of the Light Brigade
There were thirty million English who talked of England's might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.
They felt that life was fleeting; they knew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song.
They asked for a little money to keep the wolf from the door;
And the thirty million English sent twenty pounds and four!
They laid their heads together that were scarred and lined and grey;
Keen were the Russian sabres, but want was keener than they;
And an old Troop-Sergeant muttered, "Let us go to the man who writes
The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites."
They went without bands or colours, a regiment ten-file strong,
To look for the Master-singer who had crowned them all in his song;
And, waiting his servant's order, by the garden gate they stayed,
A desolate little cluster, the last of the Light Brigade.
They strove to stand to attention, to straighten the toil-bowed back;
They drilled on an empty stomach, the loose-knit files fell slack;
With stooping of weary shoulders, in garments tattered and frayed,
They shambled into his presence, the last of the Light Brigade.
The old Troop-Sergeant was spokesman, and "Beggin' your pardon," he said,
"You wrote o' the Light Brigade, sir. Here's all that isn't dead.
An' it's all come true what you wrote, sir, regardin' the mouth of hell;
For we're all of us nigh to the workhouse, an, we thought we'd call an' tell.
"No, thank you, we don't want food, sir; but couldn't you take an' write
A sort of 'to be continued' and 'see next page' o' the fight?
We think that someone has blundered, an' couldn't you tell 'em how?
You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now."
The poor little army departed, limping and lean and forlorn.
And the heart of the Master-singer grew hot with "the scorn of scorn."
And he wrote for them wonderful verses that swept the land like flame,
Till the fatted souls of the English were scourged with the thing called Shame.
O thirty million English that babble of England's might,
Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night;
Our children's children are lisping to "honour the charge they made-"
And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!
-- Rudyard Kipling
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People do not get schizophrenia from serving in a war. The cause of this common mental disease is uncertain, but it does not at all seem related to war, or even stress.
The fact that this man’s pension was not paid is a slip-up in the government system, and families themselves should take part of the responsibility for not looking after a sick relative for all these years.
The complaint is typical of welfarist Canadians: someone else should have done something. The more a population is raised on a “government-will-take-care-of-you” ethos, the more they will complain in this way.
Of course, if you have someone like the government to blame, it is very comforting to the relatives, and relieves them of part of their own guilt.
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