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 fter
nationalizing airport security, tweaking due process, bailing out
the airlines, and birthing a behemoth-in-the-making known as the
Office of Homeland Security, Washington is ready to launch the next
phase in the home-front war on terror: federalizing the nation's
volunteers.
Promising to
"improve homeland security, strengthen our communities and
create a common civic experience never before known in America,"
Senators Evan Bayh (D., Ind.) and John McCain (R., Ariz.) have coauthored
the Call to Service Act. In order to keep that panacean promise,
the senators plan to balloon Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps program into
a monstrosity five times its current size. If Tuesday night's State
of the Union address is any indication, President Bush is eager
to help them do just that. According to the president, his newly
minted USA FreedomCorps "will expand and improve the good efforts
of AmeriCorps and Senior Corps to recruit more than 200,000 new
volunteers."
Like Bayh and
McCain, the president is hoping to tap into America's renewed sense
of civic responsibility. "We have been offered a unique opportunity,"
he intoned, "and we must not let this moment pass." As
Bayh and McCain put it in a New York Times op-ed last November,
"Americans again are eager for ways to serve at home and abroad.
Government should make it easier for them to do so."
In other words,
before we can help others, Washington needs to help us.
Of course,
nothing could be further from the truth. Americans already have
every opportunity to serve their country and their countrymen. Bush,
McCain, and Bayh know that because they have lived it. As the grandson
of a senator and son of a president, Bush has public service flowing
through his veins. McCain, whose father and grandfather were naval
officers, flew combat missions in Vietnam and was a POW prior to
serving in Washington. The son of a senator, Bayh has been in public
service most his adult life. These men didn't need AmeriCorps to
channel their civic energies. And average Americans don't, either.
According to
the Independent Sector, a coalition of nonprofit groups, 110 million
American adults volunteer today — a six-percent increase from
1995. Almost 90 percent of us volunteer when asked. We give the
overwhelming majority of our free time to our neighbors and the
nonprofit groups they rely on — not the government.
Consider the
passengers of Flight 93, doomed yet destined for a hallowed place
in American history. They didn't turn to Washington to overpower
the terrorists and spare us another massacre on the ground. We didn't
ask AmeriCorps to organize the fund drives and blood drives that
spontaneously sprang up across the country within hours of the attacks.
And we didn't count on government-paid volunteers to help the orphaned
and widowed left behind by Sept. 11.
Which brings
us to something even more disconcerting than the senators' government-centered
definition of service: Washington's upside-down definition of volunteer.
According to Webster's, a volunteer is someone who "performs
a service willingly and without pay." But according to Washington,
a volunteer is someone who receives $4,725 in grants, a monthly
cash stipend, health insurance, child-care assistance, and money
for relocating. When it's all added up, each AmeriCorps volunteer
costs taxpayers about $15,000.
AmeriCorps
now employs 40,000 such "volunteers" annually. But if
Bayh and McCain — and now, the president — get their way,
that number will explode to 200,000 and perhaps as high as 250,000.
Fully half of the troops in Bayh and McCain's AmeriCorps will be
deputized to fight the home-front war on terror, guarding reservoirs
and patrolling nuclear facilities. While that sounds appealing,
it means most of the new AmeriCorps/FreedomCorps foot soldiers will
be working directly for the government, which is not at all appealing.
Moreover, the thought of unarmed twentysomethings guarding Hoover
Dam or Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is not particularly
reassuring.
The "bigger
and better" AmeriCorps envisioned by Bayh and McCain-and now
endorsed by President Bush-will add a staggering $100 million to
the program's annual price tag, which had already swollen from $155
million in 1994 to $237 million prior to Sept. 11. Indeed, the Bayh-McCain
plan would earmark almost a billion dollars for national-service
programs over the next eight years. (In addition, it would create
a new short-term enlistment program for military service.) This
new spending binge comes amid recession and war, a war that promises
to be long and expensive, more on the order of the Cold War than
the Gulf War — not exactly the best time to be spending money
on unnecessary programs. The days of bottomless budgets and easy
choices are gone; if they didn't end when Bill Clinton left office,
they certainly ended on Sept. 11.
Of course,
the program's problems don't end there. Many conservatives expressed
real objections to the idea behind AmeriCorps when President Clinton
proposed the program in 1993. Sept. 11 didn't change the philosophical
underpinnings of the program, nor did President Bush's renaming
of it. Whatever your opinion of AmeriCorps, it is difficult to deny
that the program promotes the political sphere above all others,
making government the critical link between the individual and society.
For those Americans who believe government is the glue that holds
everything else in place, AmeriCorps is a long-overdue solution
to the problem of apathy. But for those Americans who believe the
individual has rights to exercise free from government interference
and responsibilities to fulfill free from government coercion, AmeriCorps
is a solution in search of a problem.
By making government
the conduit between those who serve and those who are served, AmeriCorps
diminishes authentic volunteering, and in the long-term it could
even undermine the non-profit sector. Charities, churches, and synagogues
simply cannot compete with a program that pays people to do what
was once volunteer work. Nor can they compete with a program that
is compulsory.
We are fast
approaching a time when volunteering will no longer be voluntary.
Already, high schools and colleges are requiring students to perform
school-approved "volunteer work" prior to graduating.
Some employers are mandating the same of employees. McCain and Bayh
admit that they want national service to be a required "rite
of passage for young Americans." So, we could ultimately end
up with all the headache of a draft (job and family dislocation,
life interruption, the prospect of political favoritism, perhaps
even AmeriCorps/FreedomCorps protesters, etc.) and none of the advantages
(a ready fighting force to wage the battles of the long, hard war
that awaits us beyond Afghanistan, to mention just one).
The recognition
among Americans that we're connected by something more than interstates
and 401(k) plans is one of the few bright things to come out of
Sept. 11. As the president observed, "We have glimpsed what
a new culture of responsibility could look like. We want to be a
Nation that serves goals larger than self." This desire to
serve — a desire that carried our forefathers to Lexington
and Concord, and our grandfathers to North Africa and Normandy —
has been dormant far too long. It is an indictment of our pre-Sept.
11 culture that it took a massacre in the middle of Manhattan to
rekindle that desire. But now that Americans have been reawakened
to the needs of their neighbor and their nation, it is a mistake
to conclude that we need Washington to manage and subsidize our
response.
Despite Washington's
best intentions and efforts, a super-sized AmeriCorps is not going
to help us win the war on terror. That will be done by law enforcement,
the military, and average Americans who go about their business
despite the ghosts of Sept. 11. Nor will it create new opportunities
for service. The only way Washington can do that is by doing and
spending less — not more.
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