RTP-area local music and culture

[grady AT ibiblio.org]

Yes, that has certainly helped keep Israel on the moderate-to-leftward 
path that it's on.

You don't define "national service." Certainly there are a jillion 
things that people could do, apart from military service. But many of 
those things require initiative & compassion & a willingness to work 
hard, and/or a massive infrastructure of leaders/managers to train & 
point the way.

It's hard enough to get kids to pay attention & give a shit in college, 
which they are purportedly attending voluntarily. If you want more 
insight into the thrills of mandatory service, ask anybody in Chapel 
Hill who works with public-school students, or who works in a 
public-service field that might potentially be tapped by public-school 
students looking to get *their* mandatory-service requirement signed off on.

If you *are* talking primarily militarily, then keep in mind that with 
the exception of the world wars, I'm pretty sure that the draft never 
called up everybody who was eligible. And I can tell you that the 
military is neither equipped nor eager to deal with several million 
18-year-old fuckups, either in peacetime or in wartime. Army of One, 
remember? The days of handing teenagers M16s and throwing them into 
foxholes are pretty much over. You gotta be able to drive a humvee while 
packet-radio-networking a laptop and navigating via GPS in a blinding 
sandstorm.

I'm not saying that we don't need *something* to both reacquaint the 
Youth of Today with the ideals of democracy, and/or to keep our public 
institutions accountable to the public. But to make such a thing 
mandatory & universal would cost more than converting our healthcare 
system over to universal single-payer coverage, and require more 
infrastructure, and we live in an era of Smaller Government, remember?

Besides, why get these kids' hopes up? They're going to be obsoleted in 
the workforce by robots in 10-15 years anyway; why delude them into 
thinking that they can make a difference & that they have valuable 
contributions to make to society?

xo

Ross

bendy wrote:

> grady AT ibiblio.org wrote:
>
> > Yes, but Ralph doesn't care about all that stuff anymore. Now he cares 
> > about keeping our Young People free from being drafted to fight in Iraq:
>
>
> I'm going to walk into a minefield and suggest that the only way America 
> could avoid this sort of mess in the future is to have manditory 
> national service, thus stopping the rightward drift of the military, and 
> the notion that they're paid to die, should some muckety-muck have 
> another unsubstantiated hunch.
>
> I'm not sure I believe this, but I suspect it. No fucking exemptions for 
> anyone, tho' you could do Americorps type stuff if you had conscientious 
> objections, etc.
>
> It's the *no fucking exemptions* part that would be almost impossible to 
> implement, if history serves as a lesson (and it certainly has been for 
> the last week or so....)
>
> It's socialism, folks! Bring it up during the next Thanksgiving dinner 
> argument with the relatives. It'll baffle 'em.
>
> Bendy
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