This recent New York Times article on Obama’s call to service is importantly, albeit tangentially, related to some questions that I had in a post last week.
I think that service, including non-paid and low-paid work like teaching, is largely deemphasized in this nation. When service is highlighted it is often a résumé-booster. Let none deny it. My submission in the post already mentioned, for the sake of conversation, was a propagandist’s: engender in the youth of the nation an internally founded desire to serve. Mr. Obama seems to have a notion in opposition to mine. It seems that he thinks a multitude of young Americans want to serve but don’t have adequate opportunity (or rather, the funding for service organization isn’t quite high enough). I, however, assumed that there are a million-and-one ways to serve, but that there is little incentive to serve. And these incentives, if service is to remain service, cannot only be financial; they must be moral, philosophical, ideological; service is born from one individual and given to another.
I’m not sure what to think about Mr. Obama’s speech. Maybe he’s right. Maybe my talk of incentives comes from a misinterpretation of his statement, “Americans have shown that they want to step up.” Any responses?
(A copy of the speech is located here on a Wall Street Journal Blog.)
I think that service, including non-paid and low-paid work like teaching, is largely deemphasized in this nation. When service is highlighted it is often a résumé-booster. Let none deny it. My submission in the post already mentioned, for the sake of conversation, was a propagandist’s: engender in the youth of the nation an internally founded desire to serve. Mr. Obama seems to have a notion in opposition to mine. It seems that he thinks a multitude of young Americans want to serve but don’t have adequate opportunity (or rather, the funding for service organization isn’t quite high enough). I, however, assumed that there are a million-and-one ways to serve, but that there is little incentive to serve. And these incentives, if service is to remain service, cannot only be financial; they must be moral, philosophical, ideological; service is born from one individual and given to another.
I’m not sure what to think about Mr. Obama’s speech. Maybe he’s right. Maybe my talk of incentives comes from a misinterpretation of his statement, “Americans have shown that they want to step up.” Any responses?
(A copy of the speech is located here on a Wall Street Journal Blog.)
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