5 Ways Military Families Can Help Heal the Nation

It’s safe to say that our country is hurting. We’ve had an entire year through a worldwide pandemic, political polarization, enormous numbers of grieving Americans, and feelings of impatience and anger as we seek our ideas of justice and freedom.

If you’re like me, you’ve been asking yourself, how do we heal?

What in the world do we do now?

How can we come together and live in peace?

Many of us are feeling tremendous sadness with injured relationships and arguably a sense of hopelessness.

Over the years, my husband and I have made friendships with people with drastically different backgrounds from ourselves and from each other. I’ll admit to you here, we even came from differing political leanings ourselves. Yet this year, we all came closer together while we watched our friends and even families reject one another.

Why is that?

What is different about our relationships than so many around the country?

We are a military family. We have spent years coping with military service and all the challenges it brings.

Separation. Grief. Anger. Anxiety. Accepting what we cannot change. Even confronting death.

Here are the skills I think our military families can exemplify to help serve those so polarized by the times:

1. We know how to build community with people different from ourselves.

Many of us have lived around the world. We move with little notice and many plans still unknown into parts of the country or world we know almost nothing about. Sometimes we may not know a single person. Have you ever had to change the way you say something to communicate more effectively in your new location? Perhaps you have had to seek ways to make friends while your service member was away. We have a sense that we are in this together, as one military family.

As military families we have learned a way to invite people we don’t know into our homes and communities, so they can have support and feel included.

In order to build new communities as frequently as we do, we put ourselves into vulnerable situations, hoping to be included in a new place.

I’ve known many families that have had to lean on other military spouses and families for help when their service member is away. This takes a certain level of vulnerability and strength that I think is hard to experience if you aren’t a military spouse or child. If we only sought connections with people who thought like us, looked like us, or even had our exact value system, would we have the support we need as the spouse of a service member?

Who here has sat with another military spouse as they shared their vulnerable story to help support them?

*Raises hand*

Sometimes there are tears, sometimes it’s taking their kids for a few hours, and sometimes it’s a phone call from far away. We know the skill of listening and learning in order to support another when they are distressed. This year has left us all, arguably, distressed. We need good listeners, and we can teach how to do that.

2. We have perspective.

I think you all can understand when I ask the question… Did anybody die today? Jason Kander talks about this in his book Outside the Wire: Ten Lessons I’ve Learned in Everday Courage. When he was serving in his role as the Missouri Secretary of State, he talks about watching other politicians get so wound up with their feelings on the times and asking this question to keep perspective.

In today’s social media arguments and heated family gatherings, has anybody really garnered perspective on the events happening in our world? Military families have no choice but to keep perspective. The people we love most are often in harm’s way, and we can use our learned coping skills to help our communities lower the temperature of our societal anger.

In a time where our service members are choosing to go in harm’s way so the majority of our nation doesn’t and won’t need to, we have every reason to help teach others our perspective to help people see our nation’s challenges for what it is: a chance to work together to create a better country for it’s people and the world. Our service members have overcome impossible odds, more than once. Surely, we can do it too when polarization seems impossible to defeat.

3. We know how to wait for something urgent.

When our service members are away, it can be an anxious time for our families. When will they come home? Will they miss this special event? Will the date be changed again? And if you’re like me, your urgency for them to come home is rooted in the desire for them to be safe with you.

Finding and executing solutions to problems take time. Very rarely do things happen as quickly as we would like. As a military family, we learn how to cope with having to wait with no choice for things to move more quickly.

It seems a majority of people in our country want answers to their concerns right away. They see small progress as inadequate. Ultimately, this progress may truly be inadequate for the problem at hand, but we know there can be purpose in taking more time to get things right. We can all come to the table and wait—together. As military families, we can teach others how to wait in community and cope with the uncertainty, even when it’s an urgent and important matter.

4. We know how to navigate ethical dilemmas and make a decision anyway.

How many of us have encountered a very serious, ethical dilemma as a military family and weren’t sure the right decision? This could be anything from having to make choices about moving our families or choices about reenlistment. Is it the “right” thing? Of course, our service members have experienced this in their career. They are dealing with such serious issues, and in their service, they are confronted with making decisions that may sometimes be unclear about the “right” way.

I am going to go on record and say that sometimes, perhaps more times than not, we military families are faced with making decisions when we don’t know the right answer. We do the best we can with the information we have. At the moment, our country is facing numerous ethical dilemmas with the pandemic, economy, and local laws to name a few. Many families and friends see their social interactions with other people as ethical dilemmas. Because I feel this is such an important point, I want to offer a personal example.

This year, my husband and I had a baby. A few months later, vaccination options became available. It wasn’t long before you started to hear people picking sides, as if they were 100% sure on the “right” decision based on the facts at hand.

I wasn’t sure what to do. As a new mom, what would I pass along to my child? Would it hurt him? I work at a retirement home, so could I pass COVID along to someone that could lose their life? We’d already lost the lives of community residents by this time.

The bottom line is, I didn’t have answers to those questions based on the information at hand. I had to make a decision and move forward where I felt 51% sure or more about. Countless Americans can’t feel they know for sure either way, but instead of shaming each other and making people feel bad for their decisions, how about we give them grace for doing the best they can? We’ve learned with the military service, how to be okay when we don’t know the answers.

This is a lesson I learned from my husband and his service in the Army National Guard. Should he stay in and go on another deployment for a year even when our son is so young? What if our son loses a bond with him? What if the mission suffers because my husband isn’t there? Is there a “right” answer here?

We choose where we’re 51% sure, and move forward. No shaming needed.

5. We know how to sacrifice what’s most important to us for a bigger purpose.

Would we do the things we do if we didn’t see the bigger purpose in our service member’s service? Would we spend so much time apart as a family? Would we miss weddings, funerals, and holidays? What if our service member has to give up what they want or need to complete the mission?

We know the sting and grief of giving up what we find most sacred: family time, experiencing milestones together, financial opportunities, career pursuits, homes, our service members’ cherished lives… We know the cost of sacrificing for our country because we know that peace for our nation is that valuable.

The cost of sacrifice is crushing. Sometimes we feel robbed. We give up what we value the most for people who will never know, and many won’t care. But, we still do it.

What if others were willing to sacrifice being right to make someone feel welcome in their home—or even on social media? What if politicians sacrificed a possible reelection by compromising on policy with someone opposed to their view? What if people saw our country coming together as one as a reason to sacrifice something important to them? We know how to sacrifice when we absolutely don’t want to. For me, I cry my way through it and sometimes write about it. If we took time to teach and encourage sacrifice for one another, what would our country look like? In my eyes, I see a greater peace, care, and joy with one another. Maybe even political compromise and progress—together.

This is me writing about hope in our experiences and challenges: hopes to help heal our country and bring its people back together, caring for one another. We have skills that a majority of the country doesn’t have. Perhaps it could be seen as another part of duty to our nation. People need to know what we do, and how we do it.

Our military lives have lessons worth teaching, and our country can learn more about healing—together.