Ending the Economic Draft: National Service
Day by day the faces of the dead flash past on the screen: the youngest “adult” Americans, almost all of them from small towns, from minority groups: As in the Vietnam war, these are the faces of Americans with no other way out of poverty, the young, ambitious, and striving, selling their lives for the hope of something better. And, safely insulated from actually having to do what they are doing, the rest of America lionizes them: “our troops” has become a sacred phrase. We give the same lip service to the cult of warfare that we do, most of us, to the cult of Jesus: It’s a wonderful thing they are doing, but I wouldn’t—don’t have to—do it myself.
These are the young people I see passing my kitchen window every day, going to and coming from the high school next door. We have “Junior ROTC” now; it teaches them leadership, we are told; it is “not a military program,” but it teaches them to drill, to shoot, and to idolize military service. It tracks them toward ROTC scholarships (a few of them), and toward enlistment in one of the services, or in the National Guard, where they join their fathers and uncles. They are promised that they will learn trade skills, money for college . . . but never enough, and in wartime the hurried-up training prepares them to kill and be killed, not much else.
To withdraw the lifeline—too often a deathline, or a route to serious maiming—would be cruel, it is said. This is their chance to serve their country, and to make something of themselves. Their only chance. And that is immoral. We used to think we were purchasing security by using our young people this way, just as we purchase our affluence by exploiting low-wage workers in America and abroad. The Iraq war has shown what a disastrous mistake it is to confuse bullying with security.
We can do better. We can turn that youthful energy and idealism to a benefit for our own country and the rest of the world if we will call them to serve their country in constructive ways, and make them as proud of that kind of service as they are supposed to be of serving in war.
If we can’t have compulsory national service (and that might be a hard sell right now!), we will have to make service so attractive that young people will jump at the chance, at least as readily as they now jump at the chance to be warriors.
A renewed program of national service should include:
• A variety of opportunities and entry points.
• Genuine training for skills that are marketable and socially beneficial.
• Adequate pay and benefits so that the program will be genuinely accessible to the poor.
• A guarantee that no one will be forced to serve in unacceptable ways—transferred into overseas military service, let us say, the way our National Guard has been.
Some details:
1. People should be able to enter the program out of high school, with a guarantee of full college or trade-school benefits (not the measly aid that military service now provides) after two or three years of service. This would be helpful to young adults whose interests are not yet determined and who want to try a few avenues before settling on one. Or students could go directly from high school to college or vocational training on a widely-expanded “ROTC” degree program to prepare for careers, provided they serve two or three years after college or school. Each such program should include foreign language training to enable the graduates to work overseas or in underserved parts of American society. Third, the program should be open to displaced workers who need retraining and are willing to spend some service time. The program should include some hours of specialized training each week (in lieu of “drill”) to prepare the individual for service placement.
2. The training and re-training and/or educational program must be genuine, and not the kind of thing offered to displaced manufacturing workers presently. There should be a thorough analysis of skills and directions needed for a healthy American society, and a healthy world society, in the twenty-first century, and opportunities should be provided that will help to fill those needs. The private sector should be enlisted as well. (Example: in Germany, industrial firms participate in the educational/vocational program of the schools, providing training for the workers they will one day hire. The following win-win example comes to mind for our own purposes: There is a firm in Vermont that manufactures solar panels and installations; it is now one of the major producers in the U.S. Suppose that firm were to train a certain number of technicians, engineers, etc. each year to install, maintain, and teach the use of small-scale solar power stations in Third World countries—or, indeed, in parts of the United States that need them. On the model of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. could purchase the installations from the manufacturer, thereby compensating them for their share in the training costs, and pay the service volunteers during their service time overseas or in country; this would be a major aspect of U.S. foreign aid.)
In a different example, many public agencies could benefit by extra man- and womanpower for such relatively simple, but time-consuming tasks as helping poor people obtain the benefits to which they are lawfully entitled. (See David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America [New York: Knopf, 2004] 226–30.) Interns working with lawyers, doctors, nurse practitioners, social workers, and public health officials would get a first-hand look at the burdens of poverty, the kinds of laws now in place, and what needs to be done; they might be moved to pursue these much-needed professions.
American educational institutions would benefit from the additional funding for scholarships, and young people would no longer embark on their careers under a crushing load of debt.
3. At the present time, volunteering for the Peace Corps or a variety of private volunteer organizations is mainly a middle-class luxury (this seems to be less true for Americorps-VISTA, but the quality of training offered is likewise different). I have never forgotten the Senate hearings on Americorps when it was established. (I had a special interest, because my son participated in the Summer of Service that inaugurated the program.) Senator Grassley of Iowa offered the dictum that “people should not be paid for volunteering.” That means, in effect, that poor people need not apply. To enter a service program that pays only a subsistence requires a lot of backup: a family to bail you out, to maintain your medical benefits, to pay the tuition and fees you won’t be saving for in your volunteer placement. You can’t afford it if you have a backlog of student loans.
People must not be driven into service, either military or social, by economic need, nor should they be denied the opportunity to serve, and to learn while serving, by economic need. Volunteering may, and often does, inspire, but poor people need more than that. This program should pay a living wage, should provide full educational benefits (like the G.I. Bill, the engine of America’s postwar prosperity), AND full medical benefits: an enhanced V.A. or “Medicare for all who serve” would be a good vehicle for introducing truly universal medical benefits, since the initial pool would consist mainly of those least expensive to insure. And, like the V.A., it should be a lifetime benefit (and not restricted to “service-connected” injuries or illnesses!).
4. This must not become a backdoor military draft. That should be a clear and irrevocable commitment.
But, as many people have told me, it could never work! Here are the major objections I have heard:
• The military establishment won’t let it. They are having a hard enough time recruiting; they can’t afford for people to have other choices. I don’t think I need elaborate on the cynical immorality of that statement. There may in fact be fewer young people who will choose military service if they are not coerced into it by poverty or propaganda, but in all likelihood it will take several generations for a service corps to develop the kind of esprit, comradeship, and pride that even the younger branches of the military services have. That will always be the more attractive option for some.
• It will cost too much. True, it will cost a lot. But whether a thing is “expensive” or has high “costs” depends on what one regards as the true cost of that thing. What is the cost of having thousands of young people killed before they have begun to realize their potential? What is the cost of throwing away millions of lives, here and abroad, by condemning them to extreme poverty? What is the cost of destroying the environment because we lack the means or the will to apply our skills and ingenuity where they need to be placed, because at the moment it is not “cost-effective” and does not enhance the corporate bottom line? I needn’t go on. The examples of the Marshall Plan and the G.I. Bill both point to the ways in which this program will profit the American economy and advance the peace of the world, as those two programs did. I doubt that anyone, looking back on those, would say they were “too expensive.”
• Not enough people will sign up to make it work. This is potentially the most serious objection and the most likely to prove true. After so many years of incredible prosperity (much of it purchased by borrowing and by transferring the burden to the backs of impoverished people all over the world), after being told even in time of crisis that no sacrifice is necessary, the zeal for change that marked the Vietnam generation has evidently waned. This program will need to be sold with at least the same enthusiasm (and investment) given to military recruitment, and as I have stressed above, the incentives will have to be real, and so will the service: real work, not make-work. It must not be perceived as a handout, but as a genuine avenue for—to begin with—less-advantaged people to do good and do well, until such time as it becomes an attraction, and almost a given that the first leg up in life is to be earned through service to one’s country and to the needs of the world.
One way to introduce this program would be to start with a pilot in a single state (Vermont?). With federal dollar matching (the proportion to be determined), it could be put in place as an expansion of the National Guard, state by state, with scholarships to UVM and other state colleges and training centers (and in private enterprises, as above), and service projects located in Vermont or in other regions or countries with which Vermont partners.
“Some . . . see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.” (RFK). Why not, indeed? And why not now?
©Linda M. Maloney+
April 2007
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