National service

Transcript:

In 1941, in the wake of the Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt rallied the nation. The young men and women who answered that call not only defeated our enemies, but also rebuilt the American economy after the Great Depression. We now call them America’s greatest generation.
But they did something that is perhaps just as important. By working together through a crisis they forged a new American identity. At the start of the war, America was a disparate nation, where people thought of themselves primarily as farmers or factory workers, northerners or southerners, Catholics or Protestants or Baptists or Jews.

Remember all those WW II movies? Every platoon had some wise-cracking Italian kid from Brooklyn, a bigger-than-life cowboy from Texas, a snooty Boston Brahmin, and an awe-shucks farm boy from Iowa. None of them had much in common, and at first they had a hard time working together. But circumstances forced them to overcome their prejudices and, by the end of the movie, they were a band of brothers.

Flash forward to 2001. We were attacked again, and as in 1941, all Americans felt a spontaneous burst of patriotism. But unlike President Roosevelt, President Bush did not take the anger, frustration, and fear all Americans felt and lead us to a renewed sense of national purpose. The war on terror was to be fought with a professional military; the rest of us were told the best way we could help our country was to go shopping.

So here we are today, just as divided and partisan as ever. Our military has done a brilliant job, once the politicians got out of the way, of turning the tide in the fight against Islamic extremists. But the rest of us are on the sidelines. We took President Bush at his word and definitely went shopping – for everything from new homes to vacations to consumer goods – and much of it on credit. So we’re now in a financial crisis that affects everyone from Wall Street to Main Street. People who a month ago thought themselves financially secure are now worried. Young people who looked forward to brilliant careers now see their futures literally evaporating before their eyes.

But Americans are good at making lemonade out of lemons. President Bush may have missed the opportunity to renew our sense of national purpose after September 11, but this new financial crisis – which is a bag of lemons if ever there was one – could give us second chance.

For years Americans have talked about instituting some form of mandatory national public service, but the timing was never right. For the most part, the last thirty years have been an uninterrupted bull market with low unemployment, and great educational and job opportunities. Why would a young person want to spend a year in serving the country when so few of his contemporaries were? Nobody wanted to ‘lose a year’.

But all this is about to change. The bull market is over. Wall street is collapsing, and America is in the throes of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Thousands of high paying jobs have just gone up in smoke, and the trickle down effect in other parts of the economy is still to come. In short, we’re about to see more unemployment, especially among young people, than we’ve had in decades.
At the same time, America has a major education and infrastructure problem. We don’t have enough teachers, and we’ve not devoted enough resources to rebuilding America’s public works. We also need to expand the size of the military.

So let’s put them together – the crumbling infrastructure, the failing schools, the military, and match them up with the underemployed young people. Let’s rebuild America with a national service requirement which asks young people to serve their country, but let’s them choose how they fulfill it – by enlisting in the military, working to rebuild the highway system, restoring our national parks, teaching in our schools. But most important of all, it would raise a new generation of Americans who were united in a common national purpose – who would come to know the meaning of serving a cause greater than their self-interest.

At his Inaugural Address in 1961, President John F. Kennedy admonished all Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”. For far too long we’ve got the equation backwards – we’ve asked only what’s in it for us. No one wanted this financial crisis, and few predicted it. But let’s seize this moment and see if something good can come of it.