Veterans

When we were talking about the project yesterday, we touched on the topic of how some people do not want to talk about their experiences, like war veterans. As I was searching for some interesting articles, one of them caught my eyes because of it’s extraordinary shocking title, "22 veteran suicides a day". The article was about how there has been 22 veteran suicides everyday day since 1999. This means there is almost one veteran suicide every hour. Experts have no doubt though, that there is a huge number of people being missed in the national counting of veteran suicides. Military sexual assaults and combat stress has been the two big reasons of veteran suicides.

An Iraq war veteran who started Stop Soldier Suicide, Brian Kinsella states that "There's probably a tidal wave of suicides coming,"President Obama said there is a need to "end this epidemic of suicide among our veterans and troops." August 2012, he signed an executive order calling for stronger suicide prevention efforts. A year later, he announced to fund $107 million for better mental health treatment for veterans who have experienced post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury, which are signature injuries of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is extremely shocking and sad to hear that the people who have protected and shaped our country are suffering and taking their own lives away because of decisions they or their colleagues have made. It is good to hear that the government is funding for the health treatment but I wish it had taken measures much earlier.
Read the article here

2020 Olympics

As some good number of people may already know, Tokyo was voted to be the 2020 Summer Olympics hosting city over the weekend. Tokyo was up against two other cities, Madrid, Spain and Istanbul, Turkey. Although all three cities had compelling and persuasive speeches, Tokyo ended up winning the majority of the votes. For the reason of winning, Olympic presidential candidate Thomas Bach stated that "This time the IOC members have decided in favor of tradition and stability." You can find more information here.

To be truthful, as much as I was happy to hear Tokyo getting picked, I was also a little surprised mainly because of two reasons. The first reason was that there already has been a Summer Olympic at Tokyo in 1964. Although there has been two or three cities that held the Summer Olympics more than once, I thought the International Olympic Committee(IOC) would prioritize picking a city where a Summer Olympic has not yet been conducted. The second reason was regarding the ongoing problem of the Fukushima power plant disaster. Some time has passed since the nuclear power plant accident but its still not completely safe. In the next 7 years, I hope Japan will take good steps to deal with the nuclear plant situation, and all other problems so that we can have a wonderful 2020 Summer Olympics.

Feel free to leave a comment.