... Edwards repeated his frequent call for the next president to promote patriotism beyond war....Then, yesterday in her DailyKos diary announcing that John will attend YearlyKos, Elizabeth Edwards answered a question about a military draft and mentioned the national community service program Edwards promoted during the 2004 campaign and earlier:Edwards also called Monday for spreading the burden of serving the country by mandating national service.
"One of the things we ought to be thinking about is some level of mandatory service to our country, so that everybody in America not just the poor kids who get sent to war are serving this country," he said.
After the event, Edwards said [believes] that everyone should serve [the country] in some way.
John is not in favor of a military draft. Never has been. When he was in the Senate and in the 2004 campaign, he proposed a national community service program for high school students, modeled on the program at the public school our older children attended. The habit of public service is one that we want to encourage. Whether that means that high school program or a national public service program for all of us -- even those out of high school -- we know we need to think about it, to get all Americans committed in a real and meaningful way in making America as strong and as compassionate as we can. He saw on the Gulf Coast what committed Americans can accomplish, and he dreams big about how much more we could do.I really hope that a national community service program becomes key part of the 2008 campaign -- either as a requirement for the summer after high-school or during high-school or as part of a voluntary college tuition for service program.
I feel like we missed an opportunity after 9-11 when our heroes were civil servants (police, firefighters and other first-responders) and when millions of Americans donated their blood and their hard-earned wages to help their fellow Americans. And after Katrina when we saw the importance of volunteer organizations in the rescue, relief and rebuilding efforts (because they were abandoned by the federal effort). In these two defining moments of America in the 2000s, we had an opportunity to build a sense of community and to give honor to those that work on behalf of the collective good and we failed. Maybe we can still revive those opportunities.
I'm especially interested in national community service because I think it could reinvigorate a sense of civic-mindedness in the USA and overcome our tendencies toward selfishness and greed. Community service is what the Stoics and the Founders refered to as (in part) Virtue (Virtus to the Romans, Arete to the Greeks). And the very best in Christianity is its push for followers to make their faith real through compassion and service for the community.
I believe that Democrats ought to push public morality (as JRE does, note the recent push on poverty as a moral issue, same with the One America theme) to contrast ourselves with the so-called private morality or the gopers (which of course they don't live up to at all). By reinvigorating Americans sense of Virtue, we attack the black heart of goperism -- that we're each an island in the marketplace without any ties to each other. Rather, we are patriotic American citizens all in this together. That would make peoples lives better and make the Democrats a permanent majority!
National Service might include work in:
Kerry had a national service program that he stressed early on in the campaign (in fact, I got a change to talk with Teresa on a rope-line in Grand Rapids after she had discussed national service in her speech and told her how important I thought it was), but it was de-emphasized when Kerry decided to stress deficit reduction. Now is the time to revive this issue -- to be, as Edwards likes to say "patriotic about something more than war."
Obviously, I think young people have been mobilized as never before because of the soc-nets and the 2004 and 2008 campaign and national service could really be a way to transform this energy into action to change our young people and America for the better.
Many American teens will find all this quite normal since many high schools require community service as part of graduation (something Edwards has always supported).
FYI: I've had students who have participated in AmeriCorps and they've had nothing but positive things to say. However, the program is so poorly funded that their admission standards are astronomically high and they turn away thousands and thousands of good prospects.
PS: Nicholas Beaudrot wrote on Edwards and National Service a few days ago over at Ezra's.
Crossposted on the John Edwards for President blog and Michigan for Edwards blog.
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