There are more than 850,000 veterans waiting for the Department of Veterans Affairs to process their disability claims. With the average wait time at 330 days, and some veterans waiting well over a year for service according to USA Today, Senators Dean Heller (R-NV) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) have introduced legislation to reduce the backlog.

The bill, named the Veterans Benefits Claims Faster Filing Act, would require the VA to post the average turnaround time for filing claims and enable veterans to file their claim online. As Senator Heinrich said, “We have an obligation to keep America’s promise to our veterans by providing them, without delay, the best care and benefits our country has to offer.”

Senator Heller explained that the legislation is both necessary and effective:

While there is no single bill that will magically reduce the backlog, it is legislation like this that takes another positive step forward. Providing accurate information to veterans at the point they submit a claim will save time for both the veteran and the Veterans Administration, and ultimately help the VA adjudicate the claim efficiently.

At present, 82% of VA disability claims are filed on paper, significantly increasing wait times.

In a lecture sponsored by the League of Women Voters and the Rockefeller Center, Dartmouth government professor Russell Muirhead laid out the criteria for “good” citizenship. The lecture, entitled “What Good Citizens Should Know: Civics for the 21st Century” discussed the apparent civics deficiency that prevents high school students from being well-rounded citizens.

For instance, Muirhead argues that Americans should understand the major tenets of the Constitution, be familiar with our political history, and grasp public finance. An uninformed citizenry can have negative consequences for our democracy, Muirhead explained.

A lack of civic knowledge, he said, “probably empowers political elites who are ideologically more extreme than the average American.” This gives those in power, on both ends of the spectrum, “more latitude to pursue agendas that most Americans disagree with.”

While Muirhead argues that citizens by and large know what they are doing, the civics deficiency may be remedied with mandatory civics exams in high school. Check out our Civics Loses Out Again post for a discussion of recent NAEP cuts to civics testing.

With the majority of high schoolers’ civics knowledge below proficient, one school district in Pennsylvania is looking to revamp its curriculum. Pocono Mountain School District will implement a new full-year civics requirement for its 10th grade class starting this fall, and will rely on the U.S. citizenship test as a benchmark for the curriculum.

Rather than simply offering a semester-length elective civics course, this new year-round civics requirement will help students analyze topics ranging from the meaning of the stripes on the American flag to the presidential line of succession to the movement for civil rights. The goal, according to social studies supervisor Kathleen Smith, is to give students a working knowledge of their government:

“The bigger picture is that students are being provided with a good, solid education that’s going to prepare them to become positive citizens,” she said.

Want to see how well you would fare with the new curriculum? Review some sample questions from the U.S. Citizenship test here!

At its 10th annual Bradley Symposium held on Wednesday, the Bradley Foundation gathered a panel of award-winning journalists, academics, and civic activists to tackle the question: “Are we freer than we were ten years ago?”

Moderated by our AEI colleague Leon Kass (and the creator of What So Proudly We Hail), the panel included Michael Barone (AEI), Ward Connerly (American Civil Rights Institute), and Heather Mac Donald (Manhattan Institute), among others.

Asked what the most important threat to political freedom was, the panelists’ responses spanned the gamut from the erosion of constitutional safeguards to the troubles of the American public education system to harmful campaign finance laws.

While the panelists disagreed on the threats to political freedom, there was a general consensus on a solution: more emphasis on civic education and engagement. Barone encouraged Americans to study history, especially that of the Founding; Connerly exhorted citizens to vote and get engaged in their communities; Mac Donald recommended more support for civic-minded organizations like the Boy Scouts, which she termed “civic revival machines.”

While Abraham Lincoln may be famous for the monumental Emancipation Proclamation, his moving Second Inaugural Address, or his tragic assassination, much less is known about our 16th president’s more peculiar habits. Author Rich Lowry sought to remedy this deficiency by compiling a list of lesser-known Lincoln anecdotes, and the results may surprise you.

For instance, it may not make it inside your classroom’s history book, but our beloved Honest Abe hated the name “Abe”. As a young professional, Lincoln sought to achieve respectability and escape the rural poverty of his upbringing. “Abe” was not a dignified enough name for Mr. Lincoln.

At his law office, according to historian David Herbert Donald, he called his younger partner William Herndon “Billy”; Herndon called him “Mr. Lincoln.” His wife, too, called him “Mr. Lincoln”; before they had children and he began calling her “Mother,” he addressed her as “Puss,” “little woman,” or “child wife.”

Viewers of Spielberg’s “Lincoln” may be familiar with Lincoln’s creative legislative maneuvering, but did you know he once jumped out of a window to avoid a Congressional vote? While serving as a state representative in Illinois, Lincoln sought to prevent the legislature from obtaining a quorum, so the Democrats could not vote to abolish the state bank which Lincoln supported.

When Lincoln realized Democrats were on the verge of scaring up enough members, he tried to escape the statehouse–through a window. The sergeant–at–arms refused orders to give chase: “My God! gentlemen, do you know what you ask? Think of the length of Abe’s legs, and then tell me how I am to catch him.” A Democratic newspaper lampooned Lincoln by saying a resolution would soon be introduced to add a third story to the state house “so as to prevent members from jumping out windows! If such a resolution passes, Mr. Lincoln in future will have to climb down the spout.”

In this weekend’s “Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson”, authors and Weekly Standard contributors Joseph Epstein and Andrew Ferguson discussed the value of a liberal arts education. Amid declining enrollment in typical liberal arts courses and slashed program budgets, Epstein and Ferguson explained the concrete benefits of the once-popular department. Without liberal arts education, American society may lose its aspirational character, Ferguson argues:

It’s kind of a death of aspiration. The idea that you can be a better person, that there are things out there that you can appreciate more fully, that you can acquire certain mental habits that you don’t have now that will actually contribute to you flourishing as a person. Those are things worth building your life around. I’m worried that if we don’t have a large number of people with that sense of a value of liberal arts that we also lose that sense that there’s something higher to strive for.

Echoing Ferguson’s belief in the aspirational benefits of a liberal arts education, Epstein suggested that the lack of liberally educated citizens hurts civic engagement:

It’s not good for the country. Instead of the educated person, we now have “the expert”. And the expert, I think Mark Twain said it, is the guy from out of town.

For another perspective on the role of a liberal arts education in American civic life, consider Paul Cantor’s The Literary Profession and Civic Culture, the fourth in our series exploring the role of professions in a modern liberal democracy. Cantor concludes that the humanities are suffering in today’s higher education environment because humanities professors have given up on the public purpose of liberal arts.

Despite contentious engagements abroad and misconduct allegations domestically, the US military is far and away the most trusted US institution, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Sitting among a list of ten US institutions, including the federal government, large corporations, and the IRS, 67% of those polled answered that they had “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the military. The auto industry came in second place in the survey, at just 29% confidence, and the embattled IRS sat at just 10%.

It should be noted, however, that this 67% confidence figure for the military actually represents a recent decline in support:

But it’s not all good news for the military.  Its number is  down from 76% the last time the question was asked in the poll, in May 2012. And it marks an 18-point drop in confidence since January 2002, several months after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the reading stood at 85%.

The survey results showed a disparity in the decline in military confidence between men and women, with a 6% decrease for men and a 12% decrease in women.

In response to concerns over veterans’ access to adequate mental health services, the Veterans Affairs Department announced that they will expand their mental health services, starting immediately. This announcement comes after President Obama’s remarks at the National Conference on Mental Health on Monday. “Today, we lose 22 veterans a day to suicide — 22. We’ve got to do a better job … of preventing these all-too-often silent tragedies.”

Cheryl Pellerin, writing for the American Forces Press Service, outlined the additional resources that will be sent veterans’ way. The Veterans Affairs Department hired 1,600 mental health providers and 300 peer-to-peer veteran specialists. Following the award-winning mental health public awareness campaign called “Make the Connection” produced by VA in 2011, these steps will provide much needed support to veterans.

Today, they are discussing how they can work together to reduce stigma and help millions of Americans struggling with mental health problems recognize the importance of reaching out for assistance. Obama said there should be no shame in discussing or seeking help for treatable illnesses that affect too many people.

“We see it in veterans who come home from the battlefield with the invisible wounds of war, but who feel somehow that seeking treatment is a sign of weakness when, in fact, it’s a sign of strength,” he added.

As part of the effort, the administration today launched http://mentalhealth.gov, a consumer-friendly website with tools that help users with the basics of mental health and the signs of mental illness, and show them how to talk about mental health and how to get help.

Gettysburg. The word is a looking glass for America, both as a blood-and-soil union and an ideal of liberty but also as an eternal striving to make the one realize the other. Gettysburg, like America, “contains multitudes.”

The battle has likewise produced multitudes—multitudes of books that seek to wrestle with the chaotic enormity of the events of July 1-3, 1863. Not even Abraham Lincoln could fix Gettysburg for all time. The 150th anniversary of the battle this summer drives us again to peer into the glass, to reflect anew upon a moment when the American future hung uncertainly in the humid Pennsylvania air, when yet another Confederate victory, especially one on Union soil, might have broken the Lincoln administration’s grip on power. And as Allen Guelzo’s wonderful “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion” reminds us, the battle very easily might have gone another way.

… As befits a life-long Lincoln scholar, Mr. Guelzo concludes his story of the “last invasion” with an epilogue as elegantly succinct as the president’s renowned address. “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us,” Lincoln said, to demonstrate “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Allen Guelzo’s book is an extremely timely reminder that the American experiment has not been, as the Founders asserted, a “self-evident truth” but in fact a highly debatable proposition that needed to be proved, not just in July 1863 at Gettysburg but on many days and in many places since.

Read the whole thing.

]]> http://www.citizenship-aei.org/2013/06/gettysburg-at-150/feed/ 0 http://www.citizenship-aei.org/2013/05/the-real-gap-in-civil-military-relations/ http://www.citizenship-aei.org/2013/05/the-real-gap-in-civil-military-relations/#comments Fri, 31 May 2013 08:00:19 +0000 cmiller http://www.citizenship-aei.org/?p=6867 terrific post at the Weekly Standard about the civil-military gap. Reacting to a recent quote from Tom Brokaw which laments the gap and casts Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as "victims," Donnelly notes that "if there is a 'gap' in American civil-military relations, it is not because so few serve, it is because so few care to understand our military on its own terms." ]]> Our AEI colleague Tom Donnelly has a terrific post at the Weekly Standard about the civil-military gap. Reacting to a recent quote from Tom Brokaw which laments the gap and casts Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as “victims,” Donnelly notes that “if there is a ‘gap’ in American civil-military relations, it is not because so few serve, it is because so few care to understand our military on its own terms.” He continues:

We should listen more carefully.  “We who are serving, and have served, demand not to be categorized as victims.”  That’s how Marine Gen. John Kelly, now commander of U.S. Southern Command but also one of the finest combat leaders in Iraq – and a father who lost a son in Afghanistan – put it in a heartfelt and eloquent Memorial Day address. “What the experts and commentators are missing, what they will also never understand, is the sense of commitment, joy, and honor, of serving the nation in its uniform.”

No, we could not experience it, but we could strive to understand it better, to at least acknowledge it and appreciate it.  God knows we rely upon it; fewer than one percent of us volunteer to don the uniform.  But those who do choose to, and they find a meaning in their service – many meanings: in the ideal of America, in service to our nation as a union, as promise-keepers their comrades in arms, in the hopes they bring to the innocent, in the righteous justice they visit upon the evil – that is extraordinary and exalted.

Read the whole thing.