America Serves?
If you visit the website for the Office of the President-Elect, one of the pages that you will notice is one titled “America Serves“. Expecting to see a call to volunteer? Yeah, me too. But instead we get Obama’s plan to create a “corps” like the peace corps and americorps for lots of his pet projects. Then he goes on to add that he’d like to see a required 50 hours of community service for students in middle and high school and 100 hours of community service for college students. Notice the use of the word “required”. (UPDATE: The text of the site was changed shortly after this post and several others criticized the mandate. SayanythingBlog has the rundown on the new text)
The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.
Let me explain something to you as I understand it. When you require something, it no longer is a volunteer service. Then it exactly the same as the “community service” that many judges will give as a penalty sentence. Don’t be taken in by his use of the term. I’m beginning to think there is a reason he used the term American Serves instead of America Volunteers. Because it’s more like serving a sentence than doing a good service.
Here is one very significant reason that I couldn’t vote for Obama. I believe that people should be left to decide when, where, and how much volunteer and community services that they do. Much like I believe that people should be left to decide how much and to whom they will make their charitable donations. President-Elect Obama believes that the people in charge (Government) know better than you do where your time and money are spent, so they’ll require you to pick from a list of “approved” community services to serve your time at. They’ll also bump your taxes up a bit so that they can make some donations for you through entitlement programs.
I don’t know about you, but I like to make the decisions on what I do and do not do. I like to make the decision on where my money goes. If I want to give my money to the Humane Society rather than some welfare case that doesn’t even try and get a job, that’s my prerogative not the Governments.
November 7th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
…and already the Government is going to dictate how you live your life. People wonder why we called The One socialist.