The Time of Our Lives (18 page)

Why not develop a group of public service academies attached to land grant colleges and universities in a half dozen or so geographic regions? The intensive courses in languages, education, health, construction, and conflict resolution could range from twelve months to two years. When I discussed this in the presence of Bob McNair, a self-made entrepreneur who owns the Houston Texans of the National Football League, he had a good idea: Make the academies a public-private partnership.

Imagine, say, a Johnson & Johnson fellowship in Third World medicine, at a state university. Or a Caterpillar fellowship in road construction; a GE fellowship in power generators or clean-water systems; an AT&T fellowship in telecommunications; a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation fellowship in health systems. Corporate America would be helping to train people, who could then operate outside the United States, or inside.

The win-win for corporate America, which is increasingly operating outside the borders of the United States, is that the public service fellows would get accelerated training in can-do management skills that they could put to work abroad and then bring to the home office once their fellowship ends.

Academy enrollees would be paid a subsistence wage during their training and then compensated at military levels once they graduate. As an incentive, their income would be tax free for three years, which could be the minimum commitment for every volunteer.

Paul Farmer, the American physician who has dedicated his life to establishing clinics and bringing First World health care to Third World countries such as Rwanda and Haiti, should be a consultant in the construction and content of the curriculum and the training necessary to turn out productive graduates.

David Harris, who first came to America’s attention during the antiwar movement of the sixties, is now a journalist, author, and a baby boomer who can look back on a life lived honorably. He was Stanford University’s student body president and a leading voice against the Vietnam War in 1968.

Instead of burning his draft card or running off to Canada, he simply refused the call of the Selective Service System and went to federal prison for twenty months. He now lives in a log home in a eucalyptus grove high in Marin County, north of San Francisco. His inner flame continues to burn.

I interviewed Harris for a taping about the legacy of the baby boomers. “The body politic has to step away from its own militarization and understand we’re gonna survive in the future by our capacity to make common cause with as many other people as we can,” he said. “The big issues facing us are the ones that demand a kind of global unanimity if we have any hope of survival. Climate change and health issues are not going to be solved by armies. As long as we relate to the rest of the world just through militaries, we’re not gonna be able to grapple with the issues that are really gonna kill us.”

The assignments of these daring new young men and women in soft power public service would not be confined to operations in war zones.

We now live on a crowded planet where natural disasters have cataclysmic consequences. The 2004 tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, Katrina, the 2010 Haiti earthquake: All drew the U.S. military as first responders.

Matt Pottinger, the son of a longtime friend, was a
Wall Street Journal
reporter based in China when the killer tsunami struck Southeast Asia in 2004. He rushed to cover it and came away so impressed with the esprit de corps and quality of the U.S. Marines he met, it changed his life.

He went back to Beijing, befriended Marines stationed at the U.S. embassy, and persuaded them to help him to train as an officer candidate for their service. It was not easy—he was thirty-two at the time—but he made it and served with distinction on two deployments to Afghanistan and one in Iraq before returning to the United States to become a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

“I have zero regrets about my decision,” he told me, adding, “Becoming a Marine opened my eyes to aspects of my country I would not have understood if I had stayed a journalist.”

As a primary example, he cites the role of the military as an integrator of social and ethnic groups in which everyone has an equal opportunity and there are common expectations and standards.

“Take the Marine Corps,” he said. “It depends on excellence at the bottom and so those at the top are responsible for training and molding the grunts. If an officer doesn’t get that job done, he’s held accountable.

“As a result,” he said, “I go out on patrol with a Marine squad in Iraq and the leader is a twenty-year-old corporal who is part sociologist, part waterworks engineer and full-time warrior. He has awesome responsibility.

“Why can’t the Marine Corps model be an example for education reform?”

Pottinger is troubled by one critical missing element in the military ranks. “We have the middle class and the working class, we have a representative ethnic mix but we don’t have the elites. That’s wrong.”

As a result, when it comes to decision making in Washington, where the elites dominate the salons of power, Pottinger notes that “more mistakes are made by non-vets than veterans when it comes to military matters.”

For this son of privilege, with his Chinese-language skills and degree from the University of Massachusetts, the bottom line is this: “I understand my country better from inside a military uniform than I did as a civilian and as a journalist.”

Nonetheless, he also fully understands we’re rooted by law, custom, and experience in a civilian society.

To my mind, we ask too much of the military and not enough of the rest of us when it comes to putting forward our greatest strengths.

Soldiers, guardsmen, and Marines bring discipline, energy, and authority to their assignments, but in a world in which the U.S. military is already stretched thin to fulfill its combat missions, it should be a national priority to develop a civilian force to meet the needs of domestic and international disasters.

Our daughter Jennifer, a seasoned emergency room physician who spent six months working with refugees on the Pakistan-Afghan border, volunteered for duty at the time of Katrina and came away frustrated with the inefficiencies of the organization thrown together to meet the needs of displaced residents of New Orleans. When she arrived at the Memphis airport there was not a one-stop desk for physicians to check in, present their credentials—which could be certified online—and report to the area of their expertise.

She spent most of her exasperating first day trying to get credentials and an assignment so she could put her physician’s skills to work. In the future, wouldn’t it make sense if she were to carry a card certifying her ER credentials so when she reported to a disaster zone the card could be fed into a computer at a single site and she could be assigned a task within moments?

In this increasingly crowded world, natural and manmade disasters will have ever larger consequences and will require a first response that is cohesive, efficient, and interdependent. Hurricanes and exploding oil wells along the U.S. Gulf Coast, tornadoes and floods in the heartland, and homegrown terrorist attacks such as the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City are all the domestic equivalents of war, assaulting the general welfare of the citizens affected, disrupting commerce and education, and destroying property values.

A new army of public service cadets could be a huge asset for federal, local, and international agencies responsible for managing the crises.

There is a long and rich national history of Americans finding common cause and responding with a common effort. Let us not forget that the Founding Fathers represented many beliefs but were bound together by a determination to establish free will as a governing principle.

The pioneers of the nineteenth century who pushed oxen teams and rode horses into the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West were from different origins and brought with them different faiths but also a singular determination to expand their new country’s horizon and give it a latticework of community, economic development, and political opportunity. The organized labor movement of the early and mid-twentieth century was a courageous populist uprising against the rapacious exploitation of workers by wealthy interests who answered primarily to their own greed. The civil rights movement of the sixties forced a moral and legal resolution of racism by uniting like-minded citizens of many colors and standings.

We are witness to America’s great common heart whenever there is a natural disaster, and not just in our country. Haiti could not have coped without the instant response of humanitarians from around the world, most of them from the United States. It was not just a weekend commitment. Thousands of people from a wide range of organizations encamped for weeks at a time under difficult conditions.

Our youngest daughter, Sarah, a trained therapist, spent three weeks living in a tent and dodging rodents as she tended to the needs of abused and abandoned women as a grief counselor. Another group of American volunteers parachuted into an isolated mountaintop Haitian village to provide emergency food and medical relief before they cleared a landing strip for a more efficient resupply procedure.

Whenever disaster strikes at home or anywhere in the world American relief workers are always among the first to arrive and last to leave. Volunteering is part of our American character, born from the hard work of creating a democratic republic when none existed elsewhere and then taming a wild and majestic land.

We take the measure of our fellow citizens by their willingness to step beyond their own needs to help others. Every community has service clubs, veterans organizations, church groups, affiliates of national relief organizations, and homegrown charitable enterprises infused with the understanding that we all owe something beyond our personal needs.

For an emerging generation of Americans, now is an opportunity to renew and strengthen that tradition of rising to meet the challenges an unpredictable world places in its path.

CHAPTER 11
 

Stepping Up and
Signing Up

FACT:
There is no shortage of opportunities to volunteer and have an impact. United Way, the umbrella organization for community groups, launched a recruiting drive in the spring of 2011 to find one million volunteers to read, tutor, and mentor in inner-city schools. A website called Service Nation is a gathering place for individuals and organizations that are concentrating on using their talents to restart the American Dream following the Great Recession.

QUESTION:
If John F. Kennedy were around today and asked what you’d done for your country recently, how would you answer?

A
public-private partnership to institutionalize public service would be an ambitious project requiring a formidable amount of cooperation, coordination, and cash to launch but it would have at the ready an essential element: the volunteer spirit within the American character.

It has long been part of the national ethos to step forward when the need is obvious but unresolved. In my lifetime I have been witness to large and small enterprises organized to great effect by selfless citizens with no motive other than to give voice and support to a cause that will benefit all of society.

THE PAST

It was not that long ago that Los Angeles residents thought smog was just a price to be paid for progress. When we first moved to Southern California in the summer of 1966, the city was enveloped daily in a yellow acrid cloud. Later that year the cooling winds of fall came through and the smog lifted. Meredith got up one morning and was startled to see a mountain range in the distance out our window. For several months it had been completely obscured by the smoggy haze. She had had no idea it existed.

It was plainly obvious that the smog was an acute health hazard and a drag on the region’s economic future—who wants to live in an emphysema zone? Clean air standards were eventually introduced, including rigid new requirements for automobile and industrial emissions. Automobiles now burn 60 percent less gasoline than they did in 1972. Slowly, the mountains surrounding the San Fernando Valley began to be seen with more regularity.

Across the country, young people weaned on activism and drawn to nature were giving new muscle to organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, Conservation International, the Nature Conservancy, and thousands of local organizations dedicated to slowing or stopping altogether the degradation of natural resources.

President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, to set national standards for land, water, and air use for the greater good, recognizing the fundamental fact of nature: It is all-encompassing. State lines and private property boundaries are no barriers to polluted air, contaminated water, or ecosystem destruction. Recent efforts by conservative forces in Congress to either eliminate or greatly weaken the EPA are bewildering to anyone who lived with the unchecked hazards of dirty air, polluted water, and degraded land not so long ago.