Calls for National Service Must First Address Many Disservices
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Recently, calls for expanding national service have risen sharply, in the hope that it can help address America’s growing political fragility and hostility.
In 2020, a bipartisan federal commission on the public workforce called for the creation of a “widespread culture of service,” in part by expanding AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps. At an event accompanying the announcement, Susan Rice, the former national-security adviser who now advises the Biden Administration on domestic policy, mapped out a vision for a mandatory civilian-service program that would require six months or a year of service from Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, “whether it’s laying broadband or building infrastructure, or rehabilitating inner-city schools and libraries,” she said. “If we live together, if we work together, if we know each other as human beings, it’s a whole lot harder to hate each other.”
Photo above: New AmeriCorps Ohio recruits.
To my mind the members of the Democratic and Republican Parties are aware that wages do now allow for large swathes of the country to thrive, let alone survive, but I offer up this paradigm you may never have considered heretofore: if they know this fact and do nothing about it they are willfully culpable. If they do not know then they are unknowingly complicit and should leave office to make way for the people who are willing to do the homework. Apply this paradigm elsewhere, such as with climate change, and you can see the extent of their crimes, whether they’re Kyrsten Sinema or Mitch McConnell. The stagnation of the American condition breeds discontent and minor rebellion, and does not incentivize service.
Above: Mail Transportation (1938) by Fletcher Martin, in the San Pedro, California, post office
I want a nation worthy of service. I want a government that works for the people, instead of Corporate America. Indeed, there is something queasy and offensive about the idea of providing free service to the country that strangles the dreams and ambitions of my generation with illegitimate student loan debt, a country where elected officials stand back and let capital exploit our labor and charge us far too much for housing, a nation where solutions can remedy these issues but elected officials not only choose not to, they choose to lie about the problems in the first place.
I am a big fan of Evan Osnos, so I enjoyed reading and disagreeing with his piece in The New Yorker that pondered the healing utility of a national service program. To be clear, I favor a national service program. I think we need it. I think one of the challenges facing my generation is a general sense of purposelessness, of idling or being idled. As a socialist I believe the economic and moral failure of late stage capitalism has been the one doing that idling. We have somehow arrived at the pathologically sick conclusion that our jobs and our incomes define us, and many of us are only now, in the wake of a pandemic, confronting the horrors of what that’s done to us, that enforced identification, that forced lock step to capital and for capital, and we are discovering a sense of rebellion.
Above: Jacob Lawrence’s The migration gained in momentum, MoMa
Most proposals envision a voluntary commitment, betting that a “mandate” would be politically impossible, though, in May, the New York Times editorial page proposed a requirement on young Americans “for a year of their time for their country.”
I think I speak safely for the majority of my friends when I say that bunking with people who approve or even cheer mass murder in our streets, or who believe that healthcare is a privilege and not a right, is not going to make me hate those people one jot less.
Above: Boris Deutch painted this 1941 Works Progress Administration mural in the Terminal Annex building in Los Angeles, Calif. Carol M. Highsmith/The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress
I also think I speak safely for a good deal of my generation when I say that I wouldn’t spit on this country to put it out if it was engulfed in flames. (Leave it to those goofballs at the New York Times and their trash editorial page to wax ecstatic on the idea that we should carve out time in between jobs or worrying about if we’ll ever own a home to find some service time to serve “our country”, the same country that saddles us with student loan debt we’ll never finish paying off because of the usurious interest rates it charges.)
Above: Jasper John’s Three Flags, 1958.
I’ll make a deal though. I’ll do it. But here are my terms. Immediate, total student loan debt forgiveness. The release from prison of every American jailed for non-violent crimes, as well as full restitution of the moneys taken from them in the form of fines or other legal costs, with the same level of interest you charge us for student loan debt. The parasite class to crawl on its hands and knees across the country with suitcases full of cash, showering us all with the money they stole from us through twenty-years of Republican-organized wealth redistribution from the people who made the wealth through their labor—the working class—to the people who never worked a day in their life, like Donald Trump or Joe Manchin. Paul Ryan to crawl across a football field of shattered glass while being forced to explain how precisely giving away all that money to the rich in the form of tax cuts was supposed to somehow spread the wealth back to the people who created it in the first place with their labor. Frankly I’d like the last ten-years of our lives back, if the thieves can find them, since who knows how they might have played out if we hadn’t lived in a neoliberal austerity hell engineered by BOTH political parties. Then we’ll talk.
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