How about we honor our veterans?

Yesterday evening the Clark County School Board chose to finally join the rest of the United States in honoring our nation’s veterans. The decision only came ten years late. There used to be a sense of patriotism in the Las Vegas Valley. People who lived here used to feel pride in the men and women who laid their lives on the line for our freedom. That isn’t the case now; not any more.

About two years ago I stood in front of the school board and asked them to consider naming one of our schools in honor of our veterans. Some of the members said we already did. The school they referenced, Cimarron High School, used to have such a name, a decade ago before the board changed it. The claim was that the district had decided to give all the high schools western-style names, but insiders tell me that certain elements in the administration and on the board did not like “glorifying war”.

This is how cynical such an attitude on the part of bureaucracy is: the Clark County School District has a number of schools named after individuals of incredibly dubious character. One school is named after a past Assemblyman who narrowly escaped jail time for corruption. Several of his friends are currently inmates. That school’s name hasn’t been changed. It seems glorifying a corrupt public official isn’t as bad in the eyes of the school board as “glorifying war”. Oscar Goodman, the Mayor of Las Vegas, has been lobbying Congress, fervently trying to find financing for a Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas. He somehow considers that a far more important project than spending a tiny fraction of the money to dedicate a defunct city park for the veterans.

Every airport in America of any significant size has an Armed Services club for the benefit of those men and women in uniform who come through. McCarran International Airport is the only airport of its size without such a facility. Over a quarter of a million military men and women pass through that airport each year. Many of them have layovers of several hours and nowhere to rest, check emails, etc...I spoke with Randy Walker, the manager of the airport about this problem and he agreed that something had to be done. He even went so far as to guarantee matching funds and an existing lounge as long as the county came through with its part. Clark County’s commissioners could not be less interested. In contacting the USO, the service organization that at one time had clubs for our soldiers popping up like mushrooms, was actually hostile to the idea. Apparently the idea of having one of their clubs in Las Vegas is pretty distasteful.

One of the few jobs that pay even less than teaching is military service. A very large number of enlisted personnel have to sign on for food stamps to feed their family. The conditions they work under can be horrendous and, in many cases, fatal. Once their term of service is over, the least we can do is honor that service.