I'm a former military wife. Just trying to explain how military life is different to other Americans was insanely hard.
I lived in the same country. I used the same currency. I spoke the same language. Yet my life was not like that of civilians I knew and their underlying assumptions and mine that informed our decisions just did not match up to such a degree that I eventually stopped trying to explain my life choices even to people quite close to me who simply did not get the context and that their decision-making matrix and mine were largely unrelated.
I wish you luck in trying to figure out how to do this.
It's not possible to make people understand. You can try it understand others, and some others can try to understand you, but you can't make someone's open their mind if they don't want to.
To help people understand something they've never experienced, stay within their own frame of reference. That's all they've got to work with, because they don't know what they haven't experienced.
To explain poverty to a middle class Californian, frame it in culture terms that are familiar, but which still reach the same class of emotional experience you want them to understand.
e.g.
Have you ever gone shopping at The Gap for jeans with a bunch of pals, and they take forever to decide which 12 pairs of jeans they're going to get, but you only take like 20 minutes because you can only afford 4 pairs? You know how that feels?
That's interesting. Would you mind giving an example of one of these disjuncts? Some decision you made as a military wife that others did not understand?
I think the best example is actually from my divorce. A friend basically called me "stupid" for "trusting" my ex to pay me my support payments while on the phone and I basically politely hung up on her.
She was probably just worried sick about me because the stats for civilian Americans is abysmal. I think it's something like one third of men don't pay at all and one third only make partial payments, which routinely leaves women and their children in a real pickle. It can take months or years to get legal remedy, garnish his wages and get back payments -- if you get them at all.
But it doesn't work that way in the military. If he had stiffed me, I would have written his commanding officer and his wages would have been garnished post haste, much more quickly than what you typically see in the civilian world.
My friend apparently thought I was some naive little ninny who just didn't understand the cold, cruel world because I had such a sheltered existence as a homemaker. And that wasn't it at all. The rules were just different for me and I was in no danger of being left out in the cold like she was likely imagining was about to happen to me given how common that is in the civilian version of America.
That street runs both ways. When asshole landlords were raising rent every three months on soldiers and their families, the general on the base threatened to build more housing and move everyone on base, gutting the local rental market.
I'm obviously not Doreen, but I was a military brat and military myself and can relate some of what I saw. First off, there's a sense of impermanence to everything. Your best friend is often someone you will only know for ~3 years of your life. You have to meet people and become friendly with them quickly or you will have no social contacts outside your family.
If you were a military spouse, you may have had a job, but rarely a career. You move at the whim of your spouse's job (every few years) to places you don't control. You generally don't get to pick your neighbors or even your friends - you just adapt to the situation that constantly changes.
Spouses of military members that go on unaccompanied tours have it even worse. They are at home alone, often for months at a time. My anecdotal observations of Navy spouses, for example, was that cheating was a standard practice - not because the marriage was necessarily bad, but because they were so lonely. This is based on limited exposure (I was Air Force, both as a brat and active duty), so may not be as universally true as I observed.
This can all sound horrible, but it really wasn't. Just different. Different enough that sometimes it is hard to explain.
The incentive structure in the military is completely different from normal American society. Imagine a parallel, "socialist" society that exists inside the U.S.A. That's the military in a nutshell.
It has its own government-run housing authority, its own government-run medical system, you don't always know where you will end up on your next tour, you may not be allowed to quit and leave the military when you would normally expect to under some circumstances, etc.
> a parallel, "socialist" society that exists inside the U.S.A. That's the military in a nutshell.
Perfect description, which I find hilarious. It's the best large-scale example of socialism that actually works. But the Right won't admit it and the Left thinks it's hell.
I lived in the same country. I used the same currency. I spoke the same language. Yet my life was not like that of civilians I knew and their underlying assumptions and mine that informed our decisions just did not match up to such a degree that I eventually stopped trying to explain my life choices even to people quite close to me who simply did not get the context and that their decision-making matrix and mine were largely unrelated.
I wish you luck in trying to figure out how to do this.