Making Lemonade from Lemons – How Something Good Might Come From This Fiscal Crisis

KT McFarland

....For years Americans have talked about instituting some form of mandatory national public service, but the timing was never right. For the most part, the last thirty years have been an uninterrupted bull market with low unemployment, and great educational and job opportunities. Why would a young person want to spend a year in serving the country when so few of his contemporaries were? Nobody wanted to ‘lose a year’.

But all this is about to change. The bull market is over. Wall Street is collapsing, and America is in the throes of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Thousands of high paying jobs have just gone up in smoke, and the trickle down effect in other parts of the economy is still to come. In short, we’re about to see more unemployment, especially among young people, than we’ve had in decades.

At the same time, America has a major education and infrastructure problem. We don’t have enough teachers, and we’ve not devoted enough resources to rebuilding America’s public works. We also need to expand the size of the military.

So let’s put them together – the crumbling infrastructure, the failing schools, the military, and match them up with the underemployed young people. Let’s rebuild America with a national service requirement which asks young people to serve their country, but let’s them choose how they fulfill it - by enlisting in the military, working to rebuild the highway system, restoring our national parks, teaching in our schools. But most important of all, it would raise a new generation of Americans who were united in a common national purpose – who would come to know the meaning of serving a cause greater than their self-interest.

At his Inaugural Address in 1961, President John F. Kennedy admonished all Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”. For far too long we’ve got the equation backwards – we’ve asked only what’s in it for us. No one wanted this financial crisis, and few predicted it. But let’s seize this moment and see if something good can come of it.