After watching the supporters of Bernie Sanders in the current election cycle I have come to the conclusion that we should reinstate the “Draft” in this country. What, you say? Make everyone, male and female, serve in our military? No, I don’t want that. What I am proposing is that all our young people serve three years of some kind of service to our country prior to being able to enter continuing education after graduating from high school. If they are high school dropouts, their service would start on their eighteenth birthday.
Polls of our volunteer military service members show they universally oppose drafting people into their ranks. They want the person who they must depend upon to be defending their back to be someone who wants to be there, not forced to be. That doesn’t mean that all the rest of America’s youth shouldn’t have to do anything to serve our country. Right now, Sander’s supporters are demanding free healthcare, free college, free housing, etc.
Many of them support the concept of Socialism or even Communism, without understanding what that means. They want the college debt they acquired to obtain useless degrees excused. What were their parents doing when their children were getting that four year degree in Alternate Lifestyle Dynamics or Underwater Basketweaving in six years? Responsibility for your decisions is passé in many segments of our society. They screw up, and somebody else pays the bill. Not under my plan.
During their minimum three years of public service, the new draftees would be “paid” at the same rate our military is paid in non-combat areas. Ninety percent of that pay would go to pay off any future educational debt. The remaining ten percent would be for personal expenses. They would go through a Marine style bootcamp, live in military style barracks and eat military style food. They would all be required to complete formal classroom study of our nations history and the United States Constitution. In addition, they would be required to study world history, to better understand why our system of government, while not perfect, is years ahead of any other in the history of mankind.
They would, after their basic training, be assigned to various bases around the country. I’m sure that many former military bases could be utilized for this purpose. From those bases they would be assigned to serve as orderlies in public hospitals, nursing home aides, sanitation workers cleaning up the trash and refuse which foul many of our major metropolitan areas. Should they qualify, they could receive training as carpenters, plumbers, electricians, welders or air conditioning installers and repairmen. If they qualify for formal licenses in these fields, they would receive increased pay allowances. They could also, if they so chose, be trained as volunteer firefighters or police auxiliary.
All these young people would be required to wear uniforms and live under disciplinary standards equal to that expected of our military. If, after their minimum three year enlistments they should choose to do so, they would be allowed to reenlist, to earn more credits towards their higher education. In this process they would gain an understanding of self discipline and responsibility close to, if not quite equal to, that of our military, who of course have volunteered to put themselves in harms way during their service to our nation.
After this compulsory national service they would have learned to be adults, to accept responsibility for their own actions, and be old enough and mature enough to vote. They would benefit from the experience immeasurably, and our nation would as well. Will any of this ever happen in the world of “Woke” concepts and “Political Correctness”? No, probably not, but it should.