re: #229 HappyWarrior

Yeah that’s exactly what he’s said. Sigh Bernie. Anyhow my Dad was talking about this tonight, what he proposed was two years of some kind of national service military or civil and that could give the people two years an education. Sort of like the GI Bill I guess. What his way of thinking is that this type of service would have people of all sorts of different backgrounds meeting in a way they would not otherwise. I don’t know how feasible it is but it was an interesting idea.

Basically the same idea as in Starship Troopers. People like to lambast that book for ‘promoting the military’ or some such. They overlook that signing up was for ‘Federal Service’, not ‘military service’. Heinlein mentioned that service could include space traffic controller or even just washing floors in said spaceport.

The point was is that a potential citizen had to prove they were willing to give up a little of their life, or perhaps their whole life, in support of The Federation. Prove that the society they lived in was more important than themselves.

I also agree with your dad about bringing people together from disparate parts of the nation. It’s my belief that the West did as well as it did after WWII because of WWII. People from every part of the nation and every class ended up working together. In the process they became people to each other. They were all Americans, or Brits or Canadians or even Germans. It made it hard to be nasty to others from other states, provinces or classes. An individual might have a friend they served with there and would say “No way!” to attempts to hurt them.

That has changed since and I think it shows.