Friday, November 07, 2008

The WhateverCorps   [John Derbyshire]

A reader comments on ObamaCorps:

Derb — All joking aside, if President Obama pushes the forced volunteerism angle too hard, guess what's likely to happen? College-age kids enticed to join AmeriCorps, or ObamaCorps, or WhateverCorps will be kids not joining the U.S. Armed Forces.

ROTC still won't be allowed on college campuses, but I'm sure ObamaCorps will be heavily represented. And if the benefits to joining are remotely comparable to those of joining the Armed Forces — college tuition reimbursement, salary of some kind, chance to score with cute girls, etc. — you can bet that many kids will sign up to build houses in the middle of Atlanta instead of deploying to Whereeverstan to get shot at.

For eight years, the out-of-power Left has praised dissent as the highest form of patriotism, leaving little room for actual, you know, patriotism. If/when President Obama and company advertise volunteer service as an option equally as patriotic as military service — and make the goodies comparable — who will be left to defend our nation?

Many, if not most, Americans join the military for reasons beyond economic incentives. That said, for an 18-year-old kid debating what road to travel in life, offering an "equally patriotic" alternative to military service (during wartime!) is going to be awfully tempting for many. Bad road to go down.

That "scoring with cute girls" will definitely get the interest of 18-yr-olds of the male persuasion. Back in the dear old 60s, the leftist cause of the day in England was CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. We used to go on several-day marches, nights spent in sleeping bags on the floors of supporters' houses. How many of the guys on those marches really gave a fig about nuclear disarmament, will never be known …

11/07 03:43 PMShare