A few interesting links:
1) The first ever national summit on service is being held in NYC. [I blogged on that earlier.] Last night that featured a Town Hall interview of Judy Woodruff (PBS) and Richard Stengel (TIME) with Barack Obama and John McCain. Read the Obama-McCain transcript on service here. (McCain was even asked about our research on diversity and the strains it puts on social capital, although my colleague Robert Putnam, eminent political scientist, was misidentified as a sociologist.) The snippet was:
STENGEL: Robert Putnam, the sociologist, has written about how in communities that are diverse, there’s actually less social capital, less trust. What can national service do to knit up America? And I’m sorry, we only have one minute left for such a complicated question.
MCCAIN: National service can do a great deal. National service can unite us, just as the military unite us, as we meet people and interface with people from all over the world.
But also let me say, look, the greatest thing that makes America exceptional is we have had wave after wave of people come to this country for the same reason — they want to build a better life, they wanted freedom and they want to be part of America. So I don’t accept that premise that somehow — some of the most patriotic Americans that I’ve ever seen and the hardest working and most ready to serve this country and go in harm’s way are those who just came here.
2) TIME magazine: cover story on national service (“The Candidates Stump For Service”). TIME also has 21 ideas for serving America, including a mini-essay by me on importance of service in creating a new us (what I originally entitled: ‘Social Alchemy: Walls Into Bridges’.) You can also see TIME Managing Editor’s cover note about national service and some essays by McCain (“Inspiring Citizens to do More”) and Obama’s “A Call To Service”.
3) An interesting Op-Ed by David Brooks in today’s NYT on the fact that the Republican Party is missing the importance of social interconnections, what social scientists and the Saguaro Seminar calls ’social capital.’ See Brooks’ “The Social Animal” here.
1 response so far ↓
Brendan // September 20, 2008 at 1:29 pm |
Hi Tom,
I continue to appreciate the focus of your blog, and explicitly came to it to see your take on the national service forum McCain and Obama participated in. Ended up writing a piece on my blog about it (http://election2008options.blogspot.com/) that i thought i’d include a not super-long quote from here:
“There’s a section in Obama’s service plan PDF (http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/NationalServicePlanFactSheet.pdf) that focuses on the need for a “service-learning” surge. This especially sticks out to me because my mom, who is wonderful in so many ways, has been incorporating service into many of her college classes, and even teaches a course that is explicitly service-learning in nature (in the class they read numerous biographies of leaders such as Ghandi, King, Sister Helen Prejean; they then go out and serve their community for a certain number of hours–maybe I can get her to write a little about her experience with service-learning in the comments section, ay mom?). But, with Obama’s plan, the introduction to his section on service-learning says:
“[Obama] believes that all students should serve their communities. Studies show that students who participate in service-learning programs do better in school, are more likely to graduate high school and go to college, and are more likely to become active, engaged citizens…The Obama-Biden plan sets a goal for all students to engage in service, with middle and high school students performing 50 hours of service each year, and college students performing 100 hours of service each year. Under this plan, students would graduate college with as many as 17 weeks of public service experience under their belts.”
As a teenager, that type of service would have changed my world real quick, period. Because of this type of nuanced (and detailed) solution from Obama, and for reasons I’ve posited in this blog (such as the series of posts I did on the values of Obama), I think he is uniquely equipped to provide leadership to move our country into a whole new era of service–not just service to the abstract idea of “country,” but a selfless approach to service as a way to bring about a larger good for the many (opposed to the current prospering of the privileged few, as “income inequality [grows] to levels not seen since the Gilded Age”; quote from: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08032007/watch.html).“