Barack Obama wants change alright ... REAL change. In fact, he wants a completely different America. Not one powered by the people as our founders intended, but a "new" America, powered by the state.
"I won't just ask for your vote as a candidate -- I will ask for your service and your active citizenship when I am president of the United States," Obama said.
"This will not be a call issued in one speech or one program -- this will be a central cause of my presidency," he said. "We will ask Americans to serve. We will create new opportunities for Americans to serve. And we will direct that service to our most pressing national challenges."
From the LA Times:
He would see that these goals are met by, among other things, attaching strings to federal education dollars. If you don't make the kids report for duty, he's essentially telling schools and college kids, you'll lose money you can't afford to lose. In short, he'll make service compulsory by merely compelling schools to make it compulsory.
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini ... all had similar programs. Their claim also was the need for "unity" and "shared sacrifice." These programs, which consisted of various activities, were designed to "remind" the citizenry that the state is the source of "values," not culture, family, or even parents.
"The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society," Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D) famously observed. "The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself" (emphasis added).
REP. Charlie Rangel (D) has long advocated reinstating a military draft. John Kerry said his plan "will call on every American of every age and every background to serve." Presidential hopeful John Edwards says "one of the things we ought to be thinking about is some level of mandatory service to our country, so that everybody in America -- not just the poor kids who get sent to war -- are serving this country."
The sentiment to REQUIRE government servitude runs deep. But ... I believe there may be more to this, than the obvious totalitarian desires. All we have to do is look back into the inspiration of today's radical Left, the 1960's New Left. As Sol Stern writes (emphasis added):
It is no surprise that ACORN preaches a New Left-inspired gospel, since it grew out of one of the New Left's silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization. In the mid-sixties, founder George Wiley forged an army of tens of thousands of single minority mothers, whom he sent out to disrupt welfare offices through sit-ins and demonstrations demanding an end to the "oppressive" eligibility restrictions that kept down the welfare rolls. His aim: to flood the welfare system with so many clients that it would burst, creating a crisis that, he believed, would force a radical restructuring of America's unjust capitalist economy.
The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams. From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city's private economy. Yet far from sparking a restructuring of American capitalism, this explosion of the welfare rolls only helped to create a culture of family disintegration and dependency in inner-city neighborhoods, with rampant illegitimacy, crime, school failure, drug abuse, non-work, and poverty among a fast-growing underclass.
This grand plan to bring about a socialist utopia failed miserably ... so is the military the next target of the New Left?
Our military is strong precisely because it is voluntary.
So ... by flooding the military with people who don't want to be there (the obvious result of compulsion), it will lose its strength, creating a crisis, which will force a radical restructuring of America's liberty-based culture into one controlled by the state ... makes one wonder.
The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.ThomasJeffersonThomas Jefferson
I was in the army of draftees. My service ended just as the all-volunteer era was beginning, and I remember being skeptical and thinking army would become desperately short handed without the draft.
Well, the army of today is far superior. All the contrived justifications for involuntary service have been
proven to be B.S. by the success of the all volunteer system. Anyone who still advocates a draft is an idiot.
A Congressman or Senator who would throw away the stunning success the military has become, just so they can mumble empty platitudes about "universal service" is a threat to the safety and well-being of this nation.