Outrages, Real and Imagined

There’s a strange symmetry in American political discourse: the more fabricated an outrage, the more airtime it receives; the more devastating and real, the more it is buried beneath the noise. We are, in many ways, a nation trained to feel more than we think, to react harder to symbols than to systems.

Consider the enduring myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran—a story so deeply woven into our national memory that it often goes unquestioned. But as Vietnam veteran and sociologist Jerry Lembcke painstakingly documented in his book The Spitting Image, the narrative doesn’t hold up.

Through a thorough investigation of media reports, court records, and military documentation, Lembcke found no credible evidence that anti-war protesters spat on returning soldiers. In fact, many in the anti-war movement viewed soldiers as victims of the war machine, not its enemies. Some veterans even became anti-war leaders themselves.

So where did the story come from?

Lembcke argues it was a political construction—a narrative designed to delegitimize dissent, to paint the anti-war movement as unpatriotic, ungrateful, and dangerous. The myth found a powerful ally in pop culture, with films like First Blood cementing the imagery of the disrespected warrior betrayed by the public.

And yet, here we are.

Decades later, the very people who invoke this myth to stir outrage have remained largely silent in the face of a very real, very current betrayal: the massive cuts to veterans’ services embedded in recent budget proposals.

Where is the wall-to-wall media coverage? Where are the performative floor speeches? Where is the righteous indignation?

It’s one thing to defend veterans from imagined slights. It’s another to defend them from real material harm—cuts to healthcare, mental health services, housing, and job programs. These aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. They are lifelines. And they are being severed with hardly a whisper of public outrage.

It’s easier, perhaps, to be angry at a phantom than to confront the mechanisms of actual suffering. Outrage is a renewable resource in American politics—but empathy, especially when it involves policy, seems to be in shorter supply.

Let’s stop feeding the myths while ignoring the facts. If we truly care about those who’ve served, we should be shouting now—not about what may have happened in a movie script decades ago, but about what’s happening to real people, right now.