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Sunday, May 2, 2021

A call to serve

Should Young Americans Be Required to Give a Year of Service?
A year of teamwork could help bridge our social divides.

American presidents have long vied to echo John Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you."

The spirit of service, declared Ronald Reagan, "flows like a deep and mighty river through the history of our nation." Bill Clinton created AmeriCorps. George H.W. Bush likened volunteer organizations to "a thousand points of light." George W. Bush created the USA Freedom Corps. Barack Obama called on Americans to "ground our politics in the notion of a common good."

Their arguments are all the more compelling today, in a bitterly divided America struggling with a pandemic.

Many aging Vietnam-era veterans attest to the sense of community that came with either involuntary military service or the alternative service routes that those who refused the draft opted for. Conscription came to an end in 1973, and in the years since, this board has several times called on the government to expand the opportunities for national service, military or civilian. "For those young people who do not feel moved by patriotism or propelled by economics to enlist in the military, there should be other options for national service like AmeriCorps," we wrote in 2006.

The idea has a rich pedigree. When a nation is at peace, the philosopher-psychologist William James wrote in an early-20th-century essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War," the martial virtues of "intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command" — the backbone of a strong nation, in his view — can be achieved through civic works...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/opinion/us-national-service-draft.html?smid=em-share

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