Louis Armstrong's Draft Registration
I've never said this to anyone. I never thought it all the way through until today.
I was wrong about The Draft. That's how we thought of it, in capital letters, a live thing with a name. Generations of American men lived in its shadow, registered, monitored, kept track of.
It's official name was Selective Service. Along with nearly my entire generation (men of service age during the Viet Nam War years) I faced a high likelihood of conscription for military service. Many of us contermplated this in something like the way a lobster might contemplate a pot of boiling water.
After Viet Nam, when America finally came to her fork in the road on this issue, it seemed indisputably clear that an all-volunteer service was in America's best interests. The Draft could go to the dustbin of totalitarian history.
I was wrong. America's military experience since Viet Nam, has now convinced me that a form of National Service is the better way to go. Our military manpower system seems badly broken, inefficient and costly, along with the rest of our military establishment.
But it would have to be a workable, just and fair and genuinely universal system of National Service and should reach much much farther than merely military service. It would have to be carefully and thoughtfully put together.
Alas, our institutions for achieving such things, like Congress, are incapable of producing even bad policy change, much less good, useful and constructive change to how America operates.
That doesn't affect the basic point, however. I was wrong. America was wrong to abandon national Selective Service and the results have been tragically costly.
I'm sorry.