Editor’s note: Michael Ackley’s columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.
– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 20, 1961
Citizenship is not an entitlement program.
– Rahm Emanuel, August 2008
On the surface, the quotations above appear to carry similar messages. However, while the latter may be an outgrowth of the former, close consideration will show it to be a perversion of the first, which was a true call for volunteerism.
Emanuel, now President Obama’s chief of staff, believes in mandatory volunteerism, an oxymoron that the puts him at odds not only with Kennedy’s call to action but also with the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration, you may recall, lists “liberty” as an unalienable right conferred by “the Creator.” Further, Emanuel, the president and the Congress need to be reminded that the 13th Amendment to the Constitution declares: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude … shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Nevertheless, HR 1444, currently in House committee, would create a congressional commission to determine: “Whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.”
Were it not for recent, fiat-money bills, it would be difficult to find a legislative passage that excels this in naked idiocy.
Meanwhile, HR 1388 has passed the House. It would, among other things, establish a civilian National Service Reserve Corps.
It doesn’t take a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist to relate these two bills to Obama’s assertion last summer that “we cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.”
The so-called bailouts have laid the foundation of a fascist state; the only component lacking is fervid nationalism. Pardon us if it all conjures images of Germany’s National Socialists, doing close-order drill with shovels on their shoulders.
Let us, for the moment, assume most members of Congress are not stupid. (Try, darn it!) And let us assume the intentions of the administration are benign. (You don’t have to believe it; this is a mental exercise.) Then we must ask what a vastly expanded, federally financed volunteer program might accomplish – other than a cadre of ideological shock troops.
Here we are entering territory where yours truly has had some experience. Hence, we begin below multipart account of the learning experience provided my wife and me by VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), in the early years of the still ongoing “War on Poverty.”
Let us begin at the University of California, Berkeley, on Nov. 22, 1963: I was standing in one of the long, bleak corridors of Dwinelle Hall, waiting for a professor to open a classroom, when a girl approach from the far end of the building. As she neared, I saw she was weeping and asked her what the matter could be.
She replied, “President Kennedy has been shot. They think he’s dead.”
Soon the professor appeared, and as he had a master key, he was able to open the journalism classroom, where the AP ticker was just churning out the bulletin: “Kennedy dead.”
There is no need to recount the anguish of the days that followed. Let us just say Kennedy’s assassination was the first shock in a series of upheavals at Cal – the Free Speech Movement in the fall of ’64, the short-lived “Filthy Speech Movement,” and the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations launched from Sproul Plaza. All these events made my wife and me (we were married during semester break, 1966) want to do something to make our country better, and we agreed to honor President Kennedy’s call by joining VISTA after graduation.
Following commencement, we signed up as poverty warriors, and in June were winging our way east for six weeks of training in Cincinnati. I can’t say the training was worthless, for it was in the “Queen City” on the banks of the Ohio River that we began to learn that government money did not assure a high-quality experience.
Next week: From Cincy to New York to Laredo.
Another matter: Among things that impressed Oakland, Calif., Rep. Barbara Lee during her visit with Cuban President Raul Castro was that “he talked about diversity.”
“Diversity,” of course, is a worship word of the American Left, and its employment by Castro demonstrates that he knows how to garner reflex approval from anti-American Americans. Raul played these fools like a cheap harmonica. We all know how much diversity – particularly diversity of thought – is tolerated in Cuba.
