Opinion: Help wanted: Save the world, get paid little or nothing
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Back in May, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton publicly admonished young folks for thinking of work as a ‘four-letter word,’ prompting a shaming from her own overachieving 27-year-old daughter. Six and a half months closer to the election, it appears Clinton now thinks it strategically unwise to insult an entire voting bloc that leans Democratic. From the Clinton campaign’s ‘Students For Hillary’ press release:
During her remarks at each event, Clinton honored the activism and public service of students and recent graduates. In particular, she noted that between 2000 and 2006, applications to Teach for America nearly tripled and that between 2004 and 2006, applications to the AmeriCorps VISTA program jumped 50%. ‘So to those who say your generation is disengaged -- that you’re not as passionate and committed as we were -- I say, come out to Providence and Keene and Durham and Wellesley. See how every day, young people here and across America are standing up, taking charge and making the impossible possible,’ said Clinton.
So what’s happened over the past six-plus months? Have we sub-30ers been so driven to prove Clinton’s youth-shaming wrong that we’ve signed up by the millions with AmeriCorps and Teach for America? Most likely, Clinton’s flip-flop on Generation Lazy has more to do with her and other presidential candidates’ views on what constitutes proper and praiseworthy youth. To them (and many others in their age group), young folks are at their best when they perform tough work on the cheap or for free, and at their worst when they look for gratifying jobs that pay competitive salaries. Indeed, in that May speech in which Hillary bemoaned lazy youth, she decried the supposed ‘culture that has a premium on instant gratification,’ of which young people are supposedly a product.
In fairness, Clinton is a lamb on youth voluntarism compared to other candidates. Getting young-uns off their butts and putting them to work has become a fashionable issue in Campaign ’08. Former Peace Corps volunteer and Democratic presidential candidate Chris Dodd has made national service one of his campaign pillars. Both he and fellow Democrat John Edwards want to make community service mandatory for high school graduation. Republican candidate Mike Huckabee has also started singing the praises of expanding national service programs.
It must be easy to praise voluntarism and call for a lot more of it, especially when it’s some other group of people who will do the work for a pittance or nothing at all. In September, I wrote about campaign-season calls for youth national service programs. For a convincing read on the impracticality and moral repugnance of national service, click here.