Veterans Work

[Caller]: We do. So we know you’ve been pretty involved with NCIRE [Northern California Institute for Research and Education] and with veterans health research. So our question is, we were wondering how has your point of view changed since you wrote Waiting on the World to Change and Belief? If you think it’s been intensified, or changed by your work with veterans?

JM: You know, that’s a really good question. The work that I’ve done with veterans has really focused me on the task at hand. I think anybody who works with veterans, anyone who knows a military family or somebody who’s in the military or somebody who knows someone who’s in the military, there’s a certain sort of grace that is extended where you don’t really discuss the sort of large—not larger, I don’t wanna say larger—but, in a sense, more broad conversation about politics or the theory of it all. When working with NCIRE and working with veterans and meeting them, I don’t think that it changes my point of view on a song like "Belief" or "Waiting on the World To Change," because that’s sort of the way that I look at it as a songwriter, the way that I process it as a person. But in helping, or helping to help, veterans, you find that you don’t think about the politics. You don’t think about your point of view. So I would say that it’s very sobering in the sense that my point of view doesn’t matter at all. And nobody’s point of view matters at all. All that matters is the task at hand. Especially when something is now in the past. Nothing matters but the task at hand. 

So I would say working with NCIRE has focused me on that. As a songwriter, time ages songs differently, time changes the meaning of songs. "Waiting on the World To Change" is very 2006. It’s very pre, sort of, Obama administration. But I remember that summer, working on that record, I remember the news just feeling very strange. I remember—that song was a time capsule. "Belief" is a lot more of a, you know, theoretical, kind of a discussion, that for me I don’t think changes with anything. But working with these men and women, you find that your point of view is meaningless. And you learn to kind of divorce your point of view from what you’re doing. And in fact, my point of view kind of changed, you know. Which was really cool too. But you find that your point of view doesn’t help anybody. And that’s actually made watching, like, point-of-view-based television hard to watch. Because point-of-view—doesn’t help anybody to just discuss point of view. Nothing gets solved. So that was actually very cool for me to discover that.

Interviewer: I've got one question before we take some questions from the audience. You're heavily involved with charity work, and you're heavily involved with supporting veterans charities. I know that one dollar out of every ticket you sell go through a veteran's charity. What made you get involved with those charities specifically?

JM: I gotta be very honest, I wondered—and I've never told anybody that's before—but I always wondered was there something wrong with me and that I didn't have a charity. Am i a cold, heartless son of a bitch because I don't have a charity. I don't have a cause. I hear other people talking about it but I'm not talking about it. Am I cold [and] dead inside and everything is just about me. And then in about 2007 I went with a friend of mine who was an Israeli Krav Maga instructor down to a military camp military base in North Carolina. And I didn't go as a celebrity. There were no cameras. I went in under the radar, I was wearing fatigues and I was there on a whole different capacity.

And what I saw was so stirring and moving. What I saw was never going to be presented to me in any other way that I was going to find on television or the internet. This was not converted into media information, it wasn't streamlined, it wasn't compartmentalized, it was a real feeling. I had a real experience with this culture. And from then on I went "this is this is it for me." This is where my passion involuntarily gets lit up for this. Part of the reason it's great is because I was slightly involved on the fringes of the sort of green movement, sort of carbon footprint—The Inconvenient Truth year, but found very quickly that people who don't want to sound—not everybody—people who would like to continue their inaction on something, the easiest way to do that is to argue the existence of it. I didn't break the vase because there is no vase. You know what I mean, like this really highly philosophical thing of like "there is nothing to fix" is a really great way to ignore the question of "if there was, how would we fix it?" And I was very discouraged by that. Secondarily, it was wasn't my first thought, the cause of caring for returning combat veterans was, wow this is a debate club, this is a fantastic way to corner someone in a debate because you have to then move on to the next question "how would we fix it?" You can't deny the existence of it. 

It's one of the very few things that is cause or movement or a call to a call to action that you can't continue to lull yourself into inaction by saying "I personally believe it doesn't exist. And don't you encroach on my personal beliefs because in my belief system it doesn't exist. And do you want to go down as being someone who argued my belief system because they're my beliefs." There's no way to put your energies into that, you have to then talk about what there is to fix. There's no controversy. You end up sounding like a dick any way you put it other than "what can I do to help?" And that was very interesting to me and that was very compelling to me in addition to obviously seeing that there was this incredible need, I mean it is glacially large as a need. The number of people returning and the depth into their life, the relative shallowness into their lifespan they are.

They are in the first quarter of their life. They're twenty-two years old. You can't tell someone who's twenty-two that they're condemned to their experiences for the rest of their life. You couldn't tell anyone in this room that you're condemned to your experiences for the rest of your life. But to a lot of these guys and girls coming home, the sort of template here is, "once a vet always a vet." However you are when you get home that's it. And if you can't be inspired by looking at that sort of metric and go, Wow we've got the resources, the money, the time, and the sort of infrastructure to do it, let's just do it. This is the easiest thing to do. You'd have to then admit, I don't want to help, get up and leave. Which I would be very excited to see one day, just somebody totally implode under that.