thompsonx
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Joined: 10/1/2006
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SadistDave
I've read about this from McCrystal before. His idea of compulsory service is not restricted to the military. It also includes social and infrastructure programs. Sort of a "You will serve. Do you want to serve with a gun, a broom, or a hammer? Will you be a soldier? Will you cook meals and clean gutters for the elderly? Will you build homes for the homeless? Will you sit behind a computer and help people find jobs?" kind of a thing.
Kinda like that slavery thing?
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The rite of passage comment is not as ominous as some people seem to believe. His reference to it is along the lines of buying your first car, renting your first apartment, or graduating from college, which are rites of adulthood. His rite of citizenship refers to something common to most people that just about everyone can relate to. If everyone serves then it becomes easier to find common ground with people who come from vastly different backgrounds.
I served with officers who went to harvard...What fucking common ground did I have with them?
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He's a General. His model is military because that's his background. He imagines that having everyone serving in some way that America will be less fractured because, like the military, everyone would serve next to people from different racial, economic, religious, political, and educational backgrounds.
No the social class is preserved...clearly you have never been in the military.
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It makes people more relateable to be able to connect through a shared experience. .
It's an interesting idea actually. Imagine yourself as a young person graduating from high school or college. You have a basic education but no experience. Spending a compulsory couple of years working in the right field could give a lot of people practical experience that would make them more likely to get jobs they trained for. It also levels inequalities in the job market considerably because everyone would have the opportunity to gain some kind of useful skills and gain experience a variety of fields regardless of any social or economic factors.
We can clearly see how well this has worked in the past by checking the unemployment rate of vetrans returning the job market.
Oh waite when we do that we see that this model does not work as imagined. One would have thought that someone would have thought to check this before.
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And really, the programs don't even need to be run by the federal government or require full time participation to be beneficial. There are thousands of existing private non-profit programs that would also benefit from having a ready work force. There are also thousands of state, county, and local programs that would benefit from intern programs that give people a chance to gain experience. For example; a program as simple as reading to children in the hospital for 5 hours a week would be valuable and practical experience for young people wanting to work in social services, become teachers, run daycare centers, pediatric medicine... or maybe just become better parents later in life. In the process, the common good is served.
Cheap labor pool benifits whom?
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I actually like the idea,
Big surprise.
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RE: A National Service Obligation? - 
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