Interlude: Obama’s “New Draft”?

The upcoming Obama administration has created a website called the Office of the President Elect. On the site, the administration announces its intention to require/encourage community service among high school and college students. (Per the website, the administration would require 50 hours of community service from high schoolers and 100 from collegiates.)

Because the language smacks of conscription, conservatives like Greg Mankiw are crying out against it, going so far as to call it “a new draft”.

I can understand where these conservatives are coming from. Really, I can. Community service? As in service to the community ? That’s going a bit far. I mean, these poor kids are already required to learn basic mathematics and how to read! How far will they be pushed against their free wills?

We should let these kids choose for themselves. I propose that, as a first step, we let them opt out of learning anything about economics. Then they can choose their way out of mathematical literacy, out of appreciation of poetry and painting, out of the ability to discriminate a valid argument from a bogus one. And we won’t rest until the whole nation has opted itself into the kind of ignorance, apathy, and self-consumption that conservatives advocate. Oh, glorious!

What’s happening here is that conservatives, embittered by Obama’s election and the severe fragmentation of their party and their worldview, are falling back on their oldest ace: their threatened freedoms. (Interesting, isn’t it, that these “threats” never bloom into realities? As the Bush administration demonstrated, conservatives never see the real danger coming.)

That’s the twisted reasoning that can put a perfectly healthy proposal for mandatory community service to the plucking of healthy men and women from the domestic resource pool to put their lives at risk in the course of dubious and outrageously costly wars.

It’s strange: conservatives see the word “require” and they’re immediately up in arms. But where were they when their sometime golden-boy Bush was brushing aside the Constitution to bug the phones and computers of American citizens? Where were they when the Bush administration locked away crucial documents concerning his pappy and Ronald Reagan? Where were they when he was lying to the American public left and right in his service to an agenda the goal of which is still not clear to those whom he was morally and legally bound to represent to the best of his ability?

As a college student, I am always looking for community service opportunities, and I wish they were more frequent. I hope the Obama administration comes up with some good stuff for us.