- [Narrator] Coming up on One Detroit.

The election is over, and our political contributors offer their thoughts- - Millions making - On some of the major races.

- Their voice heard.

- [Narrator] Also ahead, we'll meet a Vietnam veteran who's using his love for long distance running to help celebrate veterans.

Plus, we'll examine efforts to encourage veterans to seek treatment for mental health issues.

And we'll tell you about some of the events happening around town this weekend.

It's all coming up next on One Detroit.

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(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Just ahead on One Detroit, as Veterans Day approaches, we'll tell you about a race that honors Michigan veterans.

Plus, we'll tell you why two local Vietnam veterans are on a mission to change the name of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and we'll give you some suggestions on how to spend this weekend in Metro Detroit.

But first up, One Detroit's political contributors analyze results from the election.

Stephen Henderson of "American Black Journal," Nolan Finley from the "Detroit News" and Zoe Clark of Michigan Public weigh in on some of the major races.

(light music) - We've heard now from Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, who actually says here in Michigan, this was the largest voter turnout in state history.

79% turnout.

Nolan Finley, usually in Michigan, in the past, when there's a higher turnout, Democrats tend to do better.

That was not the case in election 2024.

What happened?

- I don't know, I don't think anyone expected that, because it is counterintuitive.

But this was an election with a lot of passion, a lot of interest.

A lot of people wanted to get out and express themselves, and they apparently did.

- Stephen, same question.

I mean, you have been covering Michigan politics, 5.6 million Michiganders making their voice heard and shocking many.

- Yeah, no, and it's great news, right?

If you think of the path we've been on since 2018 with voter reforms and access reforms, the whole idea is to get more people to exercise their right to vote.

And so that seems to be happening.

At the same time in this election, what we saw in Detroit was the opposite happen.

19,000, fewer people turned out in Detroit than did in 2020 when Joe Biden was the candidate.

13,000 fewer than in 2016 when Detroiters sat home in large numbers, when Hillary Clinton was the candidate.

The question is why.

I mean, there are a lot of finger pointing going on about organizing and the Harris effort in Detroit right now.

There was an enthusiasm gap that I think no one thought existed.

You have the first black woman major party nominee for president, and the largest city with the largest African American population sits home in largest numbers than it had before.

There's gonna be a lot of analysis and a lot of questions about why that happened.

- Nolan, a lot of questions about why it happened, I'm curious about your viewpoint.

- I don't know, I mean, you would've thought with, well, the first black woman on the ballot and Donald Trump on the other side, he's always been a powerful motivator of Democrats.

I don't know what happened in Detroit.

Perhaps the campaign didn't spend enough time there.

Perhaps they felt like the voters in Detroit felt a little bit like the voters in Dearborn and a few other places that now that one of these candidates was suitable for them.

And this may have been, you may have been seen a bit of a protest, but I wouldn't begin to know for certain what happened.

It is certainly stunning that Detroit would not fit the trend.

- So Stephen, I've often said about 2016 that it wasn't so much that Donald Trump won Michigan, but Hillary Clinton lost Michigan again because of turnout, because of Democrats just simply not turning out.

It appears that Democrats maybe did not turn out, but it also appears that Republicans and voters of possibly all stripes turned out in much larger numbers for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump grew support in nearly every single county in Michigan.

- He did.

And look, kudos to him and his team for doing that.

That's not what we expected.

Like Nolan, I can't begin to explain it.

I think a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump this time will be the victims of the policies that he will implement, or at minimum, won't be beneficiaries of some of the things that he's gonna do.

They're gonna see over the next four years, I guess, what they've bought with their votes.

But there's no question that this was a shift.

There's a shift in the electorate.

Dearborn, those precincts in South Dearborn where Joe Biden carried 88% of the vote in 2020, and Donald Trump won the majority.

I mean, I think that's kind of indicative of this shift that we've seen.

It's not everywhere, but it is in some key places with some key demographics.

Latino men, African American men, Arab Americans switching sides.

Now, what are they gonna get for that vote?

What will happen over the next four years?

I would say not good things for any of those demographics, but they get to decide for themselves, and they did.

- Nolan, there was a bright spot for Democrats, interestingly enough, in another statewide race, and that is a Democratic Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin will become Michigan's next Senator.

What do you make of the fact that Slotkin was able to win this statewide race over Republican Mike Rogers, who really, I mean, spent a lot of time with Donald Trump when he was here campaigning?

- Well, I mean, she spent a lot of money too.

I mean, it was a very close race.

There was probably more money spent in that race, perhaps than any other senate race we've ever seen in this state.

He was outspent on the order of 10 to 1, and money doesn't always talk, but it talked loud enough, I think, in this case to push her over the top.

I'll go back to something Steve said in terms of the motivator here.

I think Donald Trump did as well as he did with so many different voter groups for the same reason he didn't win in 2020.

People punish failure.

They viewed his administration, first administration as a failure and voted him out.

And they viewed this administration as a failure.

And the huge mistake Democrats made, and I think Donald Trump wouldn't be president-elect today if they hadn't made this mistake, they picked a member of the administration that people were so dissatisfied to run for president.

I think almost any other credible Democrat would've prevailed in this election.

But people vote their self-interest and they didn't feel that the Biden-Harris administration had met their needs in the four years they gave them.

- Yeah, and this was a changed election, and it was framed that way by many different things, not just by Donald Trump, but by people's feelings.

Look, the economic indicators all say that things are much, much, much better than they were four years ago, but the ones that people feel day-to-day in their lives are still very, very tough.

- Stephen Henderson, Nolan Finley, there's a lot to dig into.

We will continue to in the weeks and months to come.

Thanks so much to both of you.

- Veterans Day is Monday, November 11th, and one local man is bringing together veterans in the community at an event called the 4Star 4Mile Race.

Vietnam veteran Doug Howell started the annual race, which runs alongside the Detroit Veterans Day Parade.

I spoke with Howell about the race and how running has helped him improve his physical and mental health.

(light music) Tell us about the race.

When is it, where is it happening?

- The 4Star 4Mile Race is part of an overall event called the Arms Services Salute.

And it's always held on the Sunday before Veterans Day every year.

We're the only race in the country that I know of that runs alongside a parade.

Same course, same time, same start line, same finish line.

Participants get to run next to a high school band or a Medal of Honor winner or- - Oh, wow.

- A ROTC marching company.

It's very exciting.

I remember the first couple years of this, I would stand at the finish line, and people would come across the finish line in tears because of the emotion.

- How many participants are you expecting this year?

How many have we had in the past?

- We had more before the pandemic.

The pandemic hurt a lot of races all around the country, of course.

So for the most part, races are beginning to come back.

I'm hoping for 300, maybe 350.

- At what point did you decide, "I need to start this race?

It's something that I have to do."

- When I came home from Vietnam, I had just a terrible whopping case of PTSD.

I felt alone and marginalized, and like a lot of Vietnam veterans did.

Let's say for the last, oh, 40 years, I've been trying to do things for veterans, because I did not want people to go through what I went through.

Veterans who come out of the service, particularly those veterans who have been in combat lose three things.

They lose identity, they lose purpose, and they lose community.

Their identity is their rank.

They're no longer Sergeant Smith or Private Jones.

They're just another face in the crowd.

Their purpose, it's a job that they did in the service, which is not often easily transferrable to civilian jobs.

And their community is the comradery that they had with their platoon, company, brigade, whatever.

It is a comradery that is found nowhere else in the world, and it's very difficult to separate from.

I volunteered for many different veteran help groups, but nothing ever really touched me deep enough.

And all of this time, one of the things that was helping me heal was becoming a long distance runner, a marathon runner.

Running that many miles, I did an awful lot of self-realization work because of a lot of alone time.

And I said, "Well, you know what?

Maybe we should have a race that celebrates veterans, and I can get veterans and our community together just to share a healthy exercise that could be family-oriented."

- What is your message ahead of Veterans Day?

- We are all part of one big family.

We are inextricably tied to the past and the future of our veterans, because they represent us everywhere they go.

We want to be part of our communities, and we want our communities to want us to be part of our communities.

- [Narrator] Post-traumatic stress is one of the biggest challenges facing military veterans.

Two Vietnam veterans from Michigan are working to change how the nation views and treats the mental health of veterans.

One Detroit's Bill Kubota has the story.

(light music) - [Bill] Williamston, population 3,820 miles east of Lansing, Kent Hall, Vietnam vet and community leader has another meeting tonight.

- [Kent] How you doing?

- Good, how are you?

- [Bill] He served on city council, now he chairs the Parks and Rec Committee.

- Motion to excuse McGee and Wolf.

- Kent nominated me for mayor in 2016, and the friendship has blossomed ever since.

- You've cut through the bureaucracy sometimes to make good happen.

It's for the betterment of the community.

- The two most important days of your life is the day you were born and the day you figure out why.

I figured out my why, and that's what I'm doing, and it feels good.

- [Bill] Hall's why, helping veterans cope with post-traumatic stress.

His group, Honor For All, led by another Vietnam vet, Tom Tom Mahany.

Now, Hall's story starts in Linden, near Flint, high school class president, top athlete, a champion pole vaulter.

It was the 1960s, in college, he had a shoulder injury that needed surgery.

- I lost my deferment by dropping out for one semester.

They snatched me right away.

- [Bill] In the army, he spent time in Europe.

The back end of his tour?

Vietnam.

- I never saw so many mortars and explosives go out.

It was like it was fire all around.

- [Bill] Post-traumatic stress, Hall didn't know he had it.

The term didn't even exist yet.

In Linden, he finished college, work, became a city councilman, an upstanding citizen.

So everyone thought.

- I was about 40 years old when I just couldn't take it anymore.

I mean, I had three beautiful kids, I had a beautiful wife, and I didn't wanna live anymore.

So I started suicide by cop.

- [Bill] Hall made the news in 1986.

They called him the "jogging bandit," former star athlete turned bank robber.

- I robbed 13 banks with a toy gun, but they called me the jogging bandit 'cause I didn't run away.

I just, come on and catch me.

Well, the first one was right in Grand Blanc, and the second one might've been Grand Blanc.

They were all Michigan national banks until the one in Ohio.

- [Bill] Michigan National?

Hall didn't like them.

- They gave me a hassle about a car loan.

(Kent laughing) - [Bill] For that, six and a half years in federal prison.

- I was an elder in the church.

I was a councilman in the City of Linden.

In fact, the night before my arrest, I was re-ordained as an elder in the Presbyterian church there.

- [Bill] Hall rebuilt his life, eventually moving to Williamston.

Hall's Honor for All partner Tom Mahany, he's got a story too.

He lives in Royal Oak, a stone mason, artist.

As a child, destined for the U.S. Military Academy.

But Mahany was conflicted about Vietnam when he was a cadet at West Point.

- I was reassigned to the infantry when I was released from West Point, and I was released from West Point because I had different views of what Vietnam was and what we should be doing about it.

And that was in '68.

I spent the next year and a half in the Army.

- [Bill] When Mahany got back, he headed to Washington.

Unhappy with the U.S. taking the war to Cambodia, he joined another hunger striker at the capital.

He'd hold other hunger strikes by himself, more recently against the stop-loss policy during Iraq and Afghanistan, forcing soldiers to keep serving long past their scheduled release dates.

And he spoke about the high suicide rates among veterans.

- Suicides keep going.

The battle stops, but the suicide keeps going.

- [Bill] It's estimated as many as 22 veterans will kill themselves each day.

- Your brother-in-law, right?

Was- - Well, yeah.

My brother-in-law.

He committed suicide back in the '80s.

- But that was part of your motivation too, right?

- Yeah, well, I saw what it did to my sister and her two little boys.

- So how long were you actually on that hunger strike?

- 29 days.

- [Bill] Mahany in Washington, a one-man lobbyist for veterans mental health.

- I take 'em a new letter every day.

Tried to get somebody to listen, and it was finally Karl Evans office that listened.

- See, I've never heard this story before.

- No.

- Don't really get into each other's personal.

- Talk about what's gonna happen instead of what happened.

- [Kent] Yeah.

- 'Cause most of what happened wasn't that good.

- This is the Honor for All trail, and it's all been approved by City Council, the Parks Commission, and the Planning Commission.

- These are tulips.

- These are tulips?

- These are tulips, and these are- - [Bill] Big plans.

More work needed at Williamson's Memorial Park on the banks of the Red Cedar River, with a section dedicated to Veterans.

Hope is someday, a national monument too.

- [Bill] But that's what this park is all about.

You gotta work something out.

You can come here and work it out, or at least work on working it out.

- [Bill] Still a bigger project, dealing with that term PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, medical advisor for Honor For All, he ran Michigan's Department of Mental Health and helped define PTSD as a diagnostic term in 1980.

- What we based it on, it had a lot to do with the Vietnam War.

It also had a lot to do with women and what women were very concerned about at the time.

- [Bill] Amongst them, second wave feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem who tied sexual assault and domestic violence to traumatic stress.

- I saw it as the two genders coming together to define something worthy of putting, not just in the psychiatric dictionary, but the general medical dictionary.

- [Bill] The mission, change the term PTSD to PTSI, post-traumatic stress injury, and get that in the diagnostic manual, the DSM.

So all can know the problem is not their fault.

It's an injury to be treated like any other injury, as you would, say, a broken leg.

- Well, if I admit to having post traumatic stress disorder, I'm disordered, so I'm not gonna admit it.

And if I'm not gonna admit it, then I'm not gonna get treatment for it.

This is a file containing all the resolutions from all the states, starting back in 2014.

- [Bill] PTSI, Mahany has been working on this for 11 years, collecting resolutions from Michigan, then 46 other states and both chambers of Congress, - And it's going to lessen their guilt, and it's gonna cut down on suicides.

Okay, that's it for the crocus.

- [Bill] Tom Mahany, Dr. Frank Ochberg, and Kent Hall have helped change some minds, but they wanna change a lot more.

- So it's getting there, but it's not getting there quickly enough.

So I wanna show you my graphic here.

PTSI, not PTSD.

- [Bill] In Chicago, Dr. Eugene Lipov treats traumatic stress.

He shows the trauma is visible in brain scans and says he can prove the name change can help.

- So I did a survey, which I published in 2023, and presented the American Psychiatric Association, the body that controls the naming.

Turns out, yes, if you change the name, the stigma will get better.

- I think now we have the evidence to change it.

I think when we do change it, there will be a celebration that we've done the right thing.

- [Bill] The American Psychiatric Association confirms the PTSI proposal is now under initial evaluation by the DSM Steering Committee.

Perhaps the change is coming soon, driven in part by a little non-profit in Williamston, Michigan.

- We have a wall of honor there, and all the people on the wall of honor died in action, and we're here to honor them today.

But there's another bunch of people that might have died years later, even at their own hands possibly.

And those are the victims of post-traumatic stress issue, and they deserve honor.

It's as though that sniper's bullet took years or months or whatever to actually strike, and the hell they went through before they got there.

- [Narrator] And Veterans Kent Hall and Tom Mahany are trying to get a national monument built near the U.S. Capitol that recognizes veterans and post-traumatic stress injuries.

Let's turn now to some of the events taking place in Metro Detroit this weekend.

There's quite a variety, as Dave Wagner reports in today's One Detroit Weekend.

- Hi, I'm Dave Wagner with 90.9 WRCJ, here to unofficially kick off the holiday season with some great events happening across Metro Detroit.

Motor City Comic Con is at the Suburban Collection Showplace tomorrow, November 8th through November 10th.

Put on your best costumes, have meet and greets with some of your favorite TV and movie actors, take part in video game contests, and so much more.

Also, starting November 8th is the exhibition, "Fiber Flux: Midwest Educator in Textiles, Fiber Art, and Material Studies."

It allows for talented artists to cross the region to show their works from weavings to textile sculptures, and it runs through December 14th.

Another event Friday brings the World Ballet Company performing the iconic ballet "Swan Lake" at Flagstar Strand Theater in Pontiac.

Then Saturday, November 9th, Broadway Old Fashioned with Broadway star Chelsea Packard comes to the Encore Musical Theater Company in Ann Arbor.

Currently a University of Michigan Associate Professor of Voice, Packard will show off her talent that made her a part of quintessential Broadway shows like "Wicked," "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical," and more.

It's Veterans Day Monday, and with that brings the 19th Annual Veterans Day Parade on Sunday, November 10th in Corktown.

Along with the parade is the 4Star 4Mile Race.

And there's even more to do around Metro Detroit, so stay tuned for a few more options and have an eventful weekend.

(light music) - [Narrator] That'll do it for this week's One Detroit.

Thanks for watching.

Head to the One Detroit website for all the stories we're working on.

Follow us on social media, and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

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(light music) (light music continues)