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Generation Service
When the history of my generation is written, national service will be considered our most important contribution to America. It represents a cultural shift of tectonic proportions - the "Me Generation" becoming the "We Generation". It's a path I know intimately because I walked it.
I grew up in a professional middle class family in the western suburbs of Chicago in the 1980s. My friends and I obsessed about markers of material success. Getting good grades meant getting a good job which would allow us to buy fancier cars and bigger houses than our parents had. Our goal was to live fast and easy like the characters on the television show L.A. Law.
My life changed when I got to college in the early 1990s. Service was becoming as central to campus culture as mid-term exams. In seminars, students introduced themselves by saying their major, their year in school and where they volunteered.
The satisfaction and meaning we found in volunteering caused many of us to reassess our priorities and life paths. We found our calling tutoring children, building houses and cleaning rivers, and we asked, "How do I make my calling my career?"
In the spirit of the times, a group of social entrepreneurs answered that question by building institutions that gave my generation the opportunity to live out the service ethic in the post-college "real world". Wendy Kopp built Teach for America; Michael Brown and Alan Khazei formed City Year; and Vanessa Kirsch created Public Allies. College graduates stampeded into these programs, which often served as the first steps on a career path of service and advocacy. President Bill Clinton, recalling the ambition of President Kennedy's call to go to the moon and the idealism that created the Peace Corps, pow-wowed with this new generation of civic leaders to create the AmeriCorps program. President Bush built on this legacy through Freedom Corps.
A new chapter in the story of national service was written on September 11 and 12, at an event called ServiceNation. Senators Obama and McCain participated in a Candidate's Forum where they spent two hours agreeing that service was of paramount importance to American democracy, each taking care to commend the service the other performed. New York Governor David Paterson, following his counterpart Governor Schwarzenegger, announced that he was elevating his Director of Service and Volunteering to a Cabinet Level position. The Presidents of Duke, the University of Pennsylvania and other leading universities unveiled major new service initiatives on their campuses. Senator Orrin Hatch spoke about the bipartisan bill that he and Senator Kennedy are sponsoring which would dramatically increase opportunities for Americans to do service. Time Magazine made national service a cover story for the second year in a row.
After a lunchtime keynote address that was second-to-none, Alicia Keys sang a verse of Sam Cooke's 'Change Gonna Come'. It sent a chill down my spine. I thought back to my initiation into this movement when I was a freshman at the University of Illinois, about how it affected almost everything I've done over the past fifteen years, from taking a teaching job in Chicago's inner city when I was fresh out of college to founding the Interfaith Youth Core.
I have to say that the nostalgia I write about existed mostly in my head. The actual conference spent almost no time celebrating the huge successes of the service movement's past twenty years. The organizers wanted to keep our eyes firmly trained on the future. It is as if they were saying, there is too much still to be done - children who require tutoring, rivers that need cleaning, citizens who want to serve.
Service Nation was the equivalent of my generation arriving on the moon. We took a moment to catch our breath before making plans to go to Mars.
By
Eboo Patel
|
September 19, 2008; 12:33 PM ET
| Category:
Personal Religion
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Religion & Politics
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Posted by: Concerned The Christian Now Liberated | September 22, 2008 3:52 PM
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Regardless of race, the great race for space goes on undisturbed and will go on for generations to come. That's a big frontier and no time to waste exploring all those possibilities that are ahead of us. The U.S. will continue to lead the world in that race because we have a country of all races determined to explore a better future and the result is a better future for not just the U.S., but the entire world. It's expensive and it's going to get more expensive. We'll pay any price and bear any burden for the future success can't be defeated. This country is built on victory and courage. They are one in the same, so we have the Navy in space now. It's always a new mission and never impossible.
Posted by: baron | September 22, 2008 12:46 PM
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CCNL. "The correction beings!"
You mean revenge that is based on hatred, right?
Where do you get that "burning someone" is correction? It is called murder.
Gasoline is expensive. I was in advance auto today and a guy came in reeking of the smell of gasoline. Three people in the store comment on it including the store manager. I was so bad that the manager was ready to ask the gut to leave.
Ironically, one of the people in the store was someone that I know, haven’t seen him for a long time but it was nice to see him again. Jim said to me that gut smells like he has been rolling in gasoline, that’s when the manager said he was going to ask the guy to leave because he smelled so bad. The guy in the parking lot said his engine caught fire from a gas leak and that he poured water on it and it didn’t stop the fire, he was in a black truck, and I could recognize both of them. The guy in the truck was talking about burning his wife to death with gasoline. I told him that he would go to jail for murder and that I would be a witness to what he said. He also told me that he has hidden cameras in his house to spy on his wife with microphones and that he put a GPS system on her car so he could track her whereabouts. I told him that he will go to jail for doing these things and he laughed and said I won’t get caught. I said the very ones that think that they are above reproach are the ones that get caught. He said he didn’t care that he had people to do it for him and that they would lie for him.
The guy said “she has to pay for what she did to me.”
Posted by: Anonymous | September 21, 2008 3:39 AM
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Paganplace,
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It only wastes your time and annoys the pig."
--- Lazarus Long
Posted by: Arminius | September 20, 2008 3:30 PM
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If you want to make a pose of archaic English forms, JJ, at *least* learn the grammar?
Gods.
Posted by: Paganplace | September 20, 2008 1:46 PM
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Getting good grades takes hard work. Said good grades are required to get a good job. A good job requires even more hard work. Then and only then can a new car and home be affordable.