It’s Time for a National Service Program
A foreign government hasn’t attacked within the United States since Japan bombed the naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Before that, we have to reach all the way back to 1814, when Great Britain sacked and burned Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812.
As we inch closer to World War III with events escalating in Europe between Russia and Ukraine, we are bombarded with relentless images and notifications of the carnage and barbarity responsible so far for thousands of deaths, refugees, and untold permanent psychological malice.
While these images are important for us to visualize the brutality war wreaks, they are, here at home, as far as the barbarity goes. Here in America, war is in our living rooms, on our phones and computers, and when we’ve had enough, we simply switch them off and retreat to our warm beds, and get up again the next day to complain about COVID restrictions and gas prices. Students sit in schools all day wondering why they’re subjected to “prison;” trucker “patriot” convoys drive around guzzling diesel, protesting high fuel costs and anything else the right-wing hate media tells them is “tyranny;” “concerned parents” accost school board members as a part of a well-funded ideological agenda to ban access to books by writers of color or deal with themes about sexuality. Meanwhile, war rages in Ukraine and Yemen; China oppresses its Uighur population; and authoritarian movements subsume once-thriving democracies.
Living in a society perpetually detached from military conflict, while preferable to the alternative, creates a callous and arrogant attitude toward war and others’ suffering. Only a cruel, cynical person would suggest the horrors of war are in any way positive and should be welcomed. We should strive to promote peace and expand democracy non-violently in every corner of the globe. We must work to eliminate inequality in all forms. But when we outsource war, it becomes an abstraction. It becomes something “those” countries do. We are then the ones others rely on to clean it up, which, without a draft, is handed off to an all-volunteer military, never personally impacting most of us.
A way to address this is to institute a national service program wherein an 18-year-old man or woman, as part of his or her post-high school planning, commits to dedicate at least two years in some capacity within a local, state, or federal government agency, charity, or organization teaching, registering voters, working on political campaigns, or even, yes, within our armed forces. This was a major consideration behind the Peace Corps that President John Kennedy championed that has transformed so many lives. While not a panacea for world peace, a national service program will engage young Americans in civic participation, making them more aware of how our government operates, and provide perspectives on areas they might otherwise neither be exposed to nor about which they felt they have to care. It will sensitize Americans to institutional processes, laws, inequities, and issues our cultural insularity has convinced us are none of our concern.
The reward?
In addition to the learning and personal growth experience, we should offer a tuition-free college or trade school education.
Our society has not had to collectively sacrifice since the second world war. Without sacrifice there is no progress. Without an investment in the nation’s human infrastructure, we continue to slide further into apathy and indifference-two key ingredients on which authoritarian regimes rely.
Democracy is not self-sustaining. A national service program, while not the only way, is a way to nurture and grow it.
Originally published at https://theleftplace.substack.com on March 26, 2022.
