brooks250

November 25, 2001

The Push to Institutionalize 'Giving Back'
May Transform a Generation

By DAVID BROOKS

                   Robert Berschinski is that rarest of creatures, an Ivy League member
                   of the R.O.T.C. Each Thursday, he wears his Air Force uniform
              around the Yale campus. Until Sept. 11, almost nobody commented on it.
              But now people come up to him, and the response is all positive. People
              thank him for serving. They ask what service entails. But he's struck by how
              little some of his peers know. ''These are incredibly bright people, but many
              have no idea what the military does,'' he says. Some don't know that there
              are different service branches.

              Berschinski's experience is a little reminder of how wide the chasm is
              between civilian life and military life. It has been more than a generation since
              the draft ended during the Vietnam War. Only 6 percent of Americans under
              65 have performed military service. But it could be that the nonservice era --
              when the vast majority of citizens grew to adulthood without performing any
              duties for the common defense -- will just be a parenthesis in American
              history. Since Sept. 11, there has been a striking surge of support for some
              form of greatly expanded national service, which would be quasi-military in
              nature.

              Most current efforts to expand national service build on a program that
              already exists, AmeriCorps. AmeriCorps was initiated in the late 1980's by
              two defense-minded centrist Democrats, Sam Nunn and Dave McCurdy, to
              give young people peacetime service experience before they embarked on
              their normal career paths. The idea was taken up by the Clinton
              administration, and now there are roughly 50,000 AmeriCorps volunteers a
              year working with Habitat for Humanity, the Red Cross and other such
              groups. AmeriCorps faced strong Republican opposition, but over time the
              program has become popular, and earlier this month, President Bush, the
              most important conservative in the land, embraced it. His initiative calls for
              thousands more volunteers to help with homeland security.

              Bush's proposal would change the character of the program. Until now,
              AmeriCorps volunteers have generally devoted their efforts to helping the
              underprivileged, the sort of community service that today's high school and
              college kids do at such phenomenal rates. (As one professor famously
              quipped, ''I don't know where these kids find lepers, but they find 'em and
              they read to 'em.'')

              But homeland security is a law-and-order function, not a welfare function. It
              involves surveillance and control, not love and compassion. It's Clint
              Eastwood, not Alan Alda. The ethos that these volunteers will have to adopt
              is militaristic, and their activities will not be like the service the kids are
              performing now. And Bush's proposal is modest compared with the bill from
              Senators John McCain and Evan Bayh, which would eventually quintuple the
              size of AmeriCorps, to 250,000 volunteers a year, and would also enlist
              volunteers to help with homeland security and to respond to emergencies and
              national disasters. The McCain-Bayh bill is explicitly designed to give
              AmeriCorps volunteers the sort of tough, character-building challenges that
              previous generations experienced in the military. Young people accustomed
              to living in dorm rooms with refrigerators could find themselves sleeping in
              barracks and wearing uniforms. There would also be an 18-month
              active-duty enlistment option, even for people who didn't plan on making a
              career in the military.

              National service has always been about changing American culture as much
              as performing concrete tasks. Its proponents hope the program will help bind
              a nation that sometimes seems on the verge of fragmenting along ethnic lines.
              Other supporters see national service as an antidote to materialism; it takes
              kids out of the normal self-obsessed world of career and consumption and
              orients them toward service and citizenship. The program's size would make
              it a rite of passage for many, an institutionalized way to give something back
              to the nation.

              But the most pronounced shift, since Sept. 11, is that kids brought up in a
              world of harmony would be put in a world of conflict. Today's children,
              raised in the religion of self-esteem, with everybody telling them how
              wonderful they are, would suddenly face drill sergeants reminding them they
              are nothing without the group. Kids who have been taught to think for
              themselves would have to learn to defer blindly to authority. Kids raised on
              John Lennon-style ''Why Don't We All Just Love Each Other?'' anthems
              would suddenly spend their days tracking down bad guys and throwing them
              in jail.

              The ethos of the training base or the police academy really differs from the
              ethos of the university dorm. The military virtues -- duty, honor and courage
              -- differ from the peacetime campus virtues -- tolerance, inquisitiveness,
              compassion. If AmeriCorps does expand, and if it becomes more
              paramilitary, then there really will be a cultural shift among the nation's youth.
              American history will have achieved some sort of rhythmic perfection. The
              G.I. generation gave birth to the tie-dyed generation, which gave birth to the
              black-T-shirted Internet generation, which will have given birth to the
              khaki-clad homeland-security generation in steel-tipped boots.

David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a
contributing editor at Newsweek.