Healing Vets – the Welcome Home Project – 2011update
by Boysen Hodgson
In February of 2010, I met Bill McMillan in CA when he won the Ron Hering Mission of service award for his work with his wife, Kim Shelton, on a documentary film called “The Welcome Home Project” featuring Michael Meade and 23 combat veterans and those close to them.
Read the original article by Bill McMillan here: http://mankindprojectjournal.org/search/welcome+home
The Welcome Home Project is still going! Screenings are being hosted across the US and overseas for small groups and large groups, in churches and in living rooms.
The intent that Bill, Kim, Michael Meade and the rest of the Welcome Home crew are holding is that this film help people see the cost of war on the men and women who serve … the cost that these men and women keep paying years after their time in the service is over.
In that light – the Welcome Home Project is making the film available for only $5! (just the cost of shipping!). This is a limited time offer, only happening until December 25th. If you are moved by the plight of veterans, this is a great movie to get and share. It’s a beautifully done and heartfelt film that shows the power of personal connection and story-telling to heal the heart of the wounded.
I was moved by this section from a blog entry on the Welcome Home site:
The VA is already maxed out and complaints about lack of access to care or benefits are common enough that it is no longer news. Suicide rates of up to 19/day among veterans is news that is no longer of much interest to usual news sources.
The truth of this is that Post Traumatic Stress is not really a disorder. Its simply the natural result of living with the kind of trauma that is endemic to war. The “disorder” is public numbness about all this. Democrats or Republicans, or Righties or Lefties can get all worked up depending on what political points they think they can score, but the truth is that the culture expresses many of the symptoms described as PTSD: psychological numbness, isolation, paranoid thinking, hyper arousal (see our national political climate), depression, anger, etc.
As these thousands of vets are set to return, it is past time to begin working on healing all this, and what is needed is a courageous willingness by civilians to begin to feel again. It is time, it is possible, and there are ways. That is one purpose of the film, The Welcome: to excite the latent compassion of “we the people”. Please contact us to see how you might bring the film to your community and how to use it once there. Talk it up, introduce this idea to your friends and colleagues, get ready to feel again. It is not about politics, and in some ways it isn’t even about welcoming veterans. it is about welcoming our own humanity.
Please visit the Welcome Home web site to take advantage of this special offer and feel the power of this beautiful film. Details at: http://www.thewelcomethemovie.com/hostascreeningpurchase/
– is a deeply personal issue that everyone decides for himself. Sometimes the price is high, sometimes low. But this is not very important for life. Life is an interesting thing. And the price on Viagra – too.
