Word: draft
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...were to draft one international politician to be your front man on climate change, Australian Prime Minister John Howard would not be high on your list. The conservative politician - and "mate of steel" to George W. Bush, according to the U.S. President - refused to enact the Kyoto Protocol and has long expressed doubt about global warming. Australia is second only to the U.S. in per-capita carbon dioxide emissions among major countries, and it's the world's biggest exporter of coal, the cheap, dirty fuel responsible for a quarter of the world's total carbon emissions...
...comforts of middle age - a stage that the editor of TIME and I have both reached - is that you can start making demands on young people, safe in the knowledge that they won't apply to you. Having safely escaped the Vietnam era draft ourselves, we are overcome by the feeling that the next generation should not be so lucky. Many of these young folks are volunteering for socially beneficial work, and that's good. But it's not good enough. "Volunteerism" is so wonderful that every young person should have...
...writer Nicholas von Hoffman had a slogan during Vietnam: "draft old men's money, not young men's bodies." The military draft raises special issues. When "volunteerism" may involve paying the ultimate price, it is very tempting to say this really is something you should not be able to buy your way out of. The whole "volunteerism" crusade, in fact, starts with the discomfort people feel about how we fill our military. To some extent, this discomfort is misplaced. The armed services are more socially diverse today than during Vietnam or even Gulf War I - even including several children...
...Even conceding the case for a military draft, there is a problem. The problem is that the military has no use for more than a small fraction of draft-age men and women. So if you are going to piggyback some vast national service plan on the military's need for relatively few recruits, what do you do with the rest of them? There are, it seems to me, just three possibilities: give them useful jobs that someone else is already doing; give them useful jobs that currently are not being done; or give them make-work jobs...
...Only jobs that accomplish nothing important can really avoid trouble. Scandals are another easy prediction. A desperate Commissariat of Volunteerism will find itself placing young folks as interns at home decorating businesses or excusing them entirely on grounds of an allergy to cats. As with the discredited Vietnam-era draft, the challenge for bureaucrats will be finding ways NOT to use people - because there will be far more people than can be usefully used...