It's Time for a National Youth Service
The most valuable and most
underutilized American asset is our youth population. The
United States is not a small nation; in fact, it has the third largest
population in the world. American youth
between the ages of 18 and 24 exceeds 24 million citizens. We could safely speculate that at least half
of them are high school graduates, computer literate, physically healthy, and
mentally stable. This would give us a large quality pool of no less than 12
million young Americans.
We are
facing a sad reality in America with the overall state of our youth when we
judge by American standards. Our
national school dropout rate is concerning overall but more distressing when
we look at the dropout rate among minority youth. It becomes outright heartbreaking in some
parts of the country, particularly in large cities like New York, Los Angeles,
Chicago… The American youth that does graduate from high school is, as a group, infamously below international achievement levels for developed nations. Other metrics of American youth are equally
troubling. In many ways much of our
youth is disconnected from our society, mostly because we ask very little from
it; it is the classic tyranny of low expectations. Perhaps we can begin to require more of our
youth, to whom much is given by our nation.
Something for nothing is not a fruitful formula.
Conscription of youth into national
service has existed in practically all societies in human history. For us, it was last applied during the Vietnam War when 1.8 million young American men were called into military
service. At the end of the Vietnam War
in 1975, and following a national trauma over massive youth anti-draft
demonstrations throughout that War, our nation opted to discontinue the draft
in favor of the creation of an all-volunteer army. It was a capitulation to a rebellious segment
of our youth and a clear example of surrender management in our government.
In times of war, our Army quietly
suffers from insufficient manpower, using “stop loss,” the involuntary
extension of soldiers’ enlistment agreements, to maintain manpower levels; over
50,000 of our troops have been subjected to this reprehensible back-door draft. It is also disgraceful for our nation to require our soldiers to serve multiple combat tours while virtually all our youth stay home, oblivious to our nation’s involvement in foreign wars and in an international anti-terrorism campaign. America as a nation should bow its head in shame given the record
numbers of suicides and post-traumatic stress disorder among our returning,
multiple combat-tour serving troops. The
real issue is not the legitimacy or morality of our foreign wars; it is the
injustice and the foolishness of exempting our able young men from national
service in times of war. The Greek
philosopher Aristotle suggested that the segregation of soldiers from society
leads to unstable political order, while the more contemporary French thinker
Jean Jacques Rousseau theorized that ending conscription precipitated the fall
of the Roman Empire. Our country is a
good and great nation with many good qualities; granting our youth a “free
lunch” is not one of them.
We should
create a national youth service program with the re-establishment of a
lottery-based conscription system. One
specific proposal presented here is the creation of a National Service
Auxiliary Corps (NSAC). Recruits would
train and reside in camps, and they would be relocated around the country as requested
by local authorities. Units would be
detachable to serve within and under the control of regular government agencies,
like police, schools, immigration, public health, social services,
environmental enhancement, etc. Let’s
not think for a moment that our youth would complain; they are waiting for an
opportunity to become proud Americans.
Let’s call on them to help us stop saying that “nothing can be done”
about our intractable problems; let’s once more become a united, “can do”
nation.
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