That’s a tough headline isn’t it?

As a struggling Green Bay veteran myself, it wasn’t easy to write it, but the public needs to know the truth, that as the Green Bay Veteran Housing and Recovery Program ended yesterday, it puts all of us one step closer to living on the street.

The discourse has been brutal over the past week.

Instead of Madison lawmakers trying to come together to scramble and find a solutions to keep the program open, they pointed fingers all the way down until the program here in Green Bay finally died this week (story HERE).

It hurts because I know that these programs actually work. I’ve used them. If your heart is determined, you can climb out of almost anything if you take the direction and resources as prescribed.

It hurts because as I stand here at the corner of midlife at the intersection of politics and military service, I wonder if anyone really cares.

These politicians will all go home to warm buildings tonight. To people that love them. Their place in the world secure.

Many veterans in the state and all over the country will go home to an empty park, or underneath an expressway and listen to the cars they can’t afford pass over them wondering what they could have done different. And that regret will lead many of them to take their own life.

All the while they will be unaware that their lawmakers decided to play the blame game, instead of keeping a resource to a better life within their reach.

It’s not a good day to be a veteran in Wisconsin.