In case you don’t watch this nightly program, here is a well worthwhile interview of Gates by Jim Lehrer on PBS Newshour. The various factions are busy misrepresenting the issues facing the nation regarding our wars so this is refreshing insight into Administration thinking. [Wouldn’t everyone like to see Gates run for President? Would anybody care which Party he chose?]
An interview with Jim Lehrer and outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates June 23, 2011 - 16 ½ minutes
In comparison with interviewers everywhere these days – particularly on cable – the semi-retired Jim Lehrer is a shining example of a dying art.
You can still see Lehrer on Fridays interviewing Brooks and Shields about the politics of the week. Compare that to the way Christiane Amanpour conducts herself each week on her Sunday political show or the way Charlie Rose conducts his interviews every weeknight. With Amanpour, it’s about her and her views and with Rose, it’s a little about his views and a lot about his lack of preparation and lost opportunity.
I’ve watched Lehrer for decades and I have no idea what his politics might be. In every interview I’ve seen him conduct and every news story I’ve seen him narrate, I came away both informed and without anxiety about a list of unasked questions. Lehrer should teach but then nobody today would attend.
Going back to Gates, he raised two issues beyond our wars, recession and debt that ought to get serious attention.
1. Give returning vets a job – protect the jobs of called up reservists. How simple and how important.
2. The nation should consider mandatory public service.
Sending food and money to the needy at home and abroad gets us little reward and evidence mounts that the net result of aid programs may be negative. Meanwhile, people on the ground make a major difference and are quickly accepted and appreciated by the people being served.
America is hated in many places in the world despite our aid efforts while even in war zones our people are accepted – even soldiers. It’s easy to hate the distant America because it’s anti-Muslim or anti-something but the kid who dug me a well or built us a school will always be remembered and respected – certainly not hated anyway.
My grandchildren have no opportunity to go out and work before they enter college. These kids are entering the work force at ever older ages with no work experience and except for teachers, no experience with that boss vs worker thing. I bet parents would prefer two years of service and four years of college over six years of college.
Underclass kids and high school dropouts are a growing demographic with little probability of looking for employment, let alone finding it. We used to send troubled kids into the service and many people have said, “The military made a man of me.” Public service would not have to be military only.
More than a few leaders want to bring back the WPA – the 1935 FDR New Deal, Work Projects Administration. Well, not on my watch. However, why not mandatory public service? A million or two unemployed would become employed and for two years a couple million entry level private sector jobs would need to be filled by others. The left would have to accept that the program is for two years rather than a lifetime and the right should be happy to take dropouts off food stamps for two years.
Serious adjustments would have to be made for the underclass – there is no federal program today, including the military, that will take those kids. A program would have to be created from scratch and as a nation we’d have to sign up for the discipline that would be required of the inductees. Just as in the days of the draft, individuals who fail to conform would have to face consequences. Certainly, all lawsuits would have to be blocked.
We spend money teaching African and other foreign kids to read – why not American kids? What would happen to the kids born into a world where nobody works and nobody has a father, if they spent two years in national parks or on construction crews in ordinary middle class towns?
Mandatory service aside, we are going to miss both Gates and Lehrer, not just as individuals but as the end of an era.
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