Proposed World Service Corps congressional legislation addresses world of issues

Proposed World Service Corps congressional legislation addresses world of issues

Dwayne Hunn

“Talk is cheap. If you want to change the country, write its laws,” Ed Koupal, founder of initiative factory People’s Lobby Inc. would consistently remind his Steering Board of “Fifty Mules.”

Because of Koupal’s indoctrination, about fifty Congressional offices have two citizen-initiated proposed bills on their desks that would make life better and less bloody costly. To change the country, read the World Service Corps (WSC) proposals, http://www.worldservicecorps.us, sign the on-line Petition, and contact your Congressional Reps.

What are the WSC proposals?
The first WSC proposal calls for one million Americans to volunteer into their choice of six core organizations: Peace Corps, Americorps, Habitat, Doctors sans Borders, HeadStart, or the Red Cross. Part of the volunteering incentive lies in $15,000 of tuition, educational loans, IRA, or Medical Savings contribution paid upon completing two years of service.

Six years after the proposal(s) passage, a million Americans would live the words:
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your county.
Ask not what we can do for the world, but what together we can do for the betterment of mankind.
Inspiring one million volunteers to serve requires national leaders to inspire 6/10th of 1 % of today’s approximately 170 million active Americans aged 18 and above.

Why one million?
John Kennedy wanted one million Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) to serve annually from 1970 onward.

Would the world be better with 34 million Returned Peace Corps volunteers, rather than today’s 178,000? How infrequently would the world use the term Ugly American? How infinitesimally small would the odds have fallen on 911 happening? How much better would housing, schools, and health conditions be at home and abroad?

When the world sees one million peaceful, productive Americans serving, the hatred fired at our soldiers and the blood and money we cover them with falls dramatically.

Empty leadership charisma
What if our leaders fail to inspire one million Americans to serve?

Americans are good at serving. They like barn building. They dislike barn burnings, and almost all have moved beyond cross burning. They like working in teams that serve the common good. Since 911 a huge reservoir filled with skilled, devoted, and determined Americans remains untapped. If, however, our leadership fails to inspire full-bodied volunteerism, then the backup bill kicks in.

Second ‘kicker’ WSC bill – One year required service
If six years after implementing the key “WSC Bill – Two year volunteer service,” our leaders only inspired 800,000 Americans to serve, then the ‘kicker’ bill comes alive. It then uses the recently updated Selective Service System to randomly select from (today’s approximately 40 million) 18-26 year olds, the 200,000 shortfall needed to place one million into service.

Some problems the WSC addresses:

Proliferation
We scrap treaties used to establish WMD reductions, weapons are spreading, and experts direly warn us. So, what can Joe Sixpack do? Probably not much. And Joe won’t leave the couch to press the experts into recycling nukes, or aluminum tubes.

Weapons detonated tomorrow’s in America may walk in, guided by vengeful minds, and nestled in suitcases. Changing, or at least softening, those terror-laden hearts and minds, is where the WSC’s Joe and Suzie could make a difference.

More and more of the world considers our policies stupid and hateful. More of them see harming Americans as an answer. Until we stem the hatred directed at “Ugly Americans,” we will continue losing legs, arms, lives, dollars, buildings, and respect.

If the one million person WSC were operational today, and we sent 20,000 WSC volunteers to Kurdistan and relatively peaceful southern Iraq to teach in schools, build Habitat homes, work with Doctors on health, and administer aid, would more Fallujah and Baghdad Iraqis more forcibly oppose harming American soldiers?

In Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Israel, Yemen, Omar, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, approximately 430 million reside. Many of them are open to converting to Al Qaeda beliefs. WMD carriers may come from there, especially since 911 did.

How many Peace Corps volunteers work in that ignored-at-our-peril terrorists breeding area? Thirty-nine.

Wouldn’t sending 100,000 constructive American characters serve us better?

Too dangerous a frontier into which to send Americans?

Historically, Americans relish venturing into dangerous frontiers. And if some threaten or harm those do-good Americans, then the world’s best-trained cavalry should do what they were reared for -- rescue them. The world recognizes that legitimate use of our military, as they supported our right to raid Afghanistan and Pakistan to snuff the gang that killed 3,000 Americans.

Costly military price
Adjusting 2004 budgetary costs with supplemental war budgets, the annual cost to maintain each of our 1.4 million military personnel nudges $400,000. That does not include post war medical, psychological, health, homelessness, and other social costs, which probably pushes the cost into a half million dollars annually.

For many who knew, know, and love those who bleed through lost lives, arms, legs, and weighty psychological scars, the costs can’t be calculated.

The annual cost of a WSC volunteer will be less than 1/10th that of maintaining each of our military personnel. Econ 101 teaches that the economic spin-offs of building homes, bridges, irrigation projects, agricultural production, health clinics, and thinking minds is much greater than that generated by exploding bombs or firing irradiated bullets. Building, and its enhanced marginal propensity to consume, creates an exponentially larger growth engine growth than does destroying.

Losing stealth technology
In 2004, we ordered another 21 stealth bombers at $1,001,000,000 each.

As we increase our stealth capabilities to explode mountains, buildings, and people, those hating us expand their stealth delivery capacity tens of thousands of times faster. On 911, we learned there were 19 crazed stealth bombers from perhaps a gang of hundreds. Today, Home Land Security can’t detect how many hundreds of thousands of such WMD delivery systems our enemies have recruited.

From the Trojan Horse to Vietnam, human driven stealth technology has defeated empires ensconced in more technical, elaborate, and costly warfare systems. Multiplying the intrusiveness of the Patriot Act will not detect and protect us from the camouflaged hatred breeding in more and more hearts and minds.

One must overwhelm the enemy and his potential recruits with an army that destroys the hatred plating the enemies’ hearts.

Military transformation
Our military budget almost equals the combined military budgets of the rest of the world.

Consequently, we have few problems winning on the traditional battlefield of yesterday’s wars. Winning on those battlefields, however, does not win today’s war. More than just a gunny sergeant must execute today’s battle plans. The winning plan must establish the foundations that grow prosperous civil societies. To win that battle, America needs a corps that wins hearts and minds.

Before and after waging bloody battles, a smart America needs a million person force that:

• Rivals the skill, dedication, and resources of our military personnel.
• Ventures into the frontiers from which tomorrow’s costly wars will explode.
• Builds the foundations of peaceful, just societies and thereby reduces deadly exposures for our military.

You can’t kill combatants with kindness, but kindness can eliminate enemies. Religions intone how performing enough good deeds erases evils. To combat the stealth technology of today’s growing army of terrorists, we need this good-deed doing WSC.

We need lithe, skilled, rapid deployment teams that Secretary Rumsfield so often promotes. Today’s complex wars need Special Forces that look less like the Star Wars warriors our soldiers now resemble. We need confident, sandaled yanks in baseball caps who walk into fields of need, speak native languages, use their tool belts, and teach while learning in the global village that includes our domestic pockets of need.

Military draft
Promoted promises and financial bonuses soar, but military recruitment dives and recruiters suffer nosebleeds.

Nationalism isn’t dead. A military draft isn’t needed. A WSC builds nationalism and weakens our lurking and growing 21st century enemies.

Wars and genocide
Scores of wars and genocidal killings rage through the world.

Our news and governmental agencies are too preoccupied to bother us with such. Doing WSC work on the fringes of these wars and genocides, with our velvet gloved military ready to aid any imperiled WSC members, would dampen, and in time erase, the ignorance that fires these wars and genocides.

Media Bias
Once national news ran an hour a day.

My Croatian-speaking Grandma listened. But she still taught that the best way to know the world lay not in watching the news, but in traveling, studying in the classroom, and, if that was unaffordable, then in learning from books and maps at the library.

Once reporters and newspapers dug deep. They threw hardball questions at Presidential press conferences, and weren’t paid by the administration. Then media owners were counted on dozens of hands, rather than a digit or two over one hand.

No matter which side of the political spectrum you fall, most should agree with Grandma. We learn through travel. And the classroom of the world is the best former of personal opinions that media, slanted in any direction, cannot easily warp.

If you believe there is news bias, then dismantle it by annually putting a million Americans learning in the world from whence the news arrives. Working the world establishes the first hand knowledge that media bias cannot erase. Game players know more about the game than those who just watch the narrated game.

Political IQ
At one time or other, all sides of the political spectrum complain that our political policies are dumb. Therefore, all sides should endorse gaining practical knowledge as the best means of producing smart policies. The complex global village, with its myriad of cultures, religions, languages, and habits is not easily reduced to fit what are too often myopic, uninformed American policies. Exposing a million Americans a year to America and the world’s complexities will help produce smarter, more effective policies.

Better intelligence
For those who feel better spying is America’s answer to safety, where could future agents receive better training and understanding than from the WSC? And for those who despise spying and will question implementing a WSC for that reason, relax. Spies have always been. Often real life experience gleaned in their Bondish work turns those despised by spy haters to help the goals of spy-haters. So relax, if you let the world into your life, the world often changes you.

Education
Under congressional testimony, Fed Chair Allan Greenspan consistently points to the GI Educational Bill of Rights as the foundation that built what was once the unrivaled engine of economics and ideas. Asked on June 9th, by members of the Joint Economic Committee as to why economic disparity was spreading in America, his artful dodge still got to the answer, “If we solve the education problem, we’ve got it solved.”

With WSC experiences added to tuition aid, we rebuild our crumbling educational base.

Jedi warriors
The Stith’s Dark Force cherishes power for personal use. The Jedi feel their responsibility is to care and protect those who need it. America needs the Jedi WSC to ensure the force survives over the bloody dark side that comes when empires seek personal aggrandizement.

When Kennedy said in the early 60’s,

“There is not a place in the world that is not of concern to all of us…. We are responsible for the maintenance of freedom all over the world.”

He did not envision maintaining freedom 40 years later by targeting our idealistic, high-teched soldiers, reservists, and off-budget mercenaries to 140 countries for a growing clan of American haters.

Kennedy’s in-law, Sarge Shriver, was right in his vision of the world:

“If the Pentagon’s map is more urgent, the Peace Corp’s is, perhaps, in the long run the most important...”

Some Congressional Reps are open to introducing the WSC proposals. Help inspire 50 Congressional co-sponsors to fulfill Kennedy’s vision of having a million Americans annually making the world safer and richer. Visit http://www.worldservicecorps.us and help.

Dwayne Hunn, Ph.D., remains a People’s Lobby Inc. Board Member, served in the Peace Corps, works on Habitat Builds, and wrote the World Service Corps proposals.