Can you legislate morality?

Can you legislate morality?
Dwayne Hunn

Yeph. Sometimes, however, it takes awhile for morality to reflect itself.

Decades ago America’s racial hatred spewed immorality and bloodshed. Then the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision clarified that separate was not equal.

Enforcing that moral precept forced Americans together learning and interacting, teaching an increased proportion of Americans that character meant more than trappings of color, clothing, or income.

Today lynchings, cross burnings, and related stupidities have dwindled to a trickle.

In today’s global village, where terrorist recruitment skyrockets, we must duplicate what integration did. Here’s how the citizen-initiated World Service Corps Congressional proposals, http://www.worldservicecorps.us, legislate morality.

The key WSC proposal calls for one million Americans to volunteer in their choice of the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Habitat for Humanity, Head Start, Doctors Without Borders, or the Red Cross, and other smaller, similar organizations. Upon completing two years of service, volunteers would receive educational tuition or loan payments of $15,000, or equivalent IRA or Medical Savings account investments. Six years after Congressional passage, one million can-do Americans would be building, not just talking about, the underpinnings of civil society abroad, as well as at home.

This impressive-to-the-world one million WSC members helps belatedly fulfill JFK’s prescient vision of quickly having a hundred thousand Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) serving annually, so that a million person force would quickly add billions of smiles to the earth’s personality.

If today we had millions of Returned Peace Corps volunteers, rather than under 178,000, would the world be more moral?

Would the terrorists buying into 911 have disappeared under decades of smiles and good works?

On 9-11, the world housed a small number of crazed terrorists. The next day, the world supported our barging into Afghanistan and Pakistan to destroy them. The world supported our desire to take an “eye for an eye” and not “turn the other cheek.” We failed to do the world’s will and decimate the handful of evil doers.

Today the percentage of crazed terrorists in the world has grown alarmingly. A significant number of this growing number comes from the area encompassed by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudia Arabia, Palestine, Israel, Yemen, Omar, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, where over 430 million reside.

How many PCVs practice exemplary American moral actions there? Thirty-nine.

From poverty, illiteracy, and misery, hate-filled ideologies grow. In the African nations of Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Malawi, Réunion, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe 300 million reside, suffering from an abundance of these terrorism-breeding ills. How many PCVs confound potential terrorists’ recruits with constructive moral actions there? Six hundred and fifty-nine.

America needs to legislate more morality, more respect for and from diverse cultures, religions, and peoples. Moral example is the best way to spread morality. And performing good deeds remains the best example.

Serving at home and abroad via building Habitat homes, teaching in Peace Corps, Headstart, and Americorps schools, aiding the sick and suffering through Doctors sans Borders and the Red Cross will reflect the morality that enacting WSC legislation induces.

Those raised in gang-strewn neighborhoods learn that having more friends equals less bloody fights. Midnight basketball is a cheaper means to reduce crime than is flooding the neighborhood with armor-plated cruisers. Once, our vaunted world image protected Americans almost anywhere. Today, an Ugly American mask bleeds us and others. Increasingly, we must rely on our costly military muscle, which too often loses more hearts and minds to the Ugly American chanters’ side.

With off-budget costs included, annually maintaining each of our 1.4 million military personnel costs us a half-million dollars. Our paid mercenaries, with their corporate tax deductibility, aren’t really cheaper. Enacting World Service Corps legislation drastically reduces future military actions and costs, and stymies the terrorists’ recruitment of hearts and minds, at less than one-tenth the military cost.

To reduce hatred fired at the Marine Corps and to strengthen America, we need more cosponsors to introduce and enact the proposed World Service Corps Congressional legislation. Learn more at http://www.worldservicecorps.us and help.


People’s Lobby Executive Director Dwayne Hunn has written the proposed World Service Corps legislation. He has served in the Peace Corps and on Habitat Builds and needs citizen to sign the on-line Petition and push the proposals into congressional legislation. http://www.worldservicecorps.us