Published January 5, 2025
A Worthy Fight: Nothing Is More Important Than Our Families
By: Michael Schoelwer, USMC, Retired
Nothing is more important to us than our families. That is especially true for the families of active-duty service members and Veterans due to the unique stresses – frequent family moves, extended overseas deployments, wartime uncertainty, routine extended separation and single-parenting – that military and post-service life place on both the members and their dependents.
For its part, the U.S. military itself is uniquely important to Virginia. Virginia has the second highest active-duty population of any state in the Union and a huge Veteran population. Direct Federal military spending accounts for 40% of the GDP of Hampton Roads, DoD spends billions of dollars every day on payrolls, R&R, and equipment purchasing in northern Virginia, and is one of the single largest employers in Charlottsville. Too, Veterans are a well-spring of skilled workers for Virginia’s burgeoning business sector.
The equation is simple: families are a cornerstone of military and Veteran life, and service members and Veterans are essential to Virginia, ergo their families are essential to the growth and prosperity of Virginia. For that reason, the health and welfare of military and Veteran families deserve special attention.
Whatever helps military and Veterans’ families helps the entire community, as a whole. However, the other side of that coin is that whatever hurts the community hurts military families. And, due to the unique demands of military and post-military life, it hurts them worse. The ills of the past 4 years – the highest inflation rates in 40 years, 85% rise in gas prices, high consumer and mortgage interest rates, low housing stocks, problematic K-12 public schools, high childcare costs – are magnified into body blows by the demands of military service and shaky finances of new Veteran families. The good news is that, by helping military and Veteran families, Virginia can achieve outsized benefits for them, the greater community, and for Virginia’s future all at the same time.
A quintessential lesson from our military service is that individuals compete, but teams win. A corollary to that is that individual actions can succeed, but long-term impact is achieved with a well-thought-out campaign plan with multiple reinforcing lines of operation. Those axioms apply equally to any program to support military and Veteran’s families.
The issues that afflict our families cross social, economic, and political boundaries. Although these issues share the trait of hampering our families, each also has separate and distinct causes, which demand separate and distinct – yet coordinated – responses. And, since the issues cross political, social, and economic sectors, different leaders will need to act in concert.
AVV is proposing that our elected leaders adopt a coordinated, integrated campaign for military and Veteran families in 2025 to address each of these issue areas. The issue calls for actions on inflation, improving access to food, childcare, and work force housing, quality K-12 education for dependents, lower energy costs, and public safety. Individual efforts against problems are welcomed. However, we seek the synergistic effects of coordinated solutions. The value of our families and the outsized impact of addressing their issues on the larger community and on Virginia as a whole are too great to settle for anything less.
The philosopher Diogenes was famous in ancient Greece for wandering the streets of Athens, in search of an honest man. Today, AVV seeks those elected officials willing to take charge of this operation. Who among those who seek our votes is willing to take on this worthy fight?
