Civilian Conservation Corps Redux - It's Deja Vu All Over Again At Area 54

The rewiring of America could easily and less-expensively be done with a national service plan like the CCC. 

Besides rebuilding our transportation infrastructure, our electrical grid and fiber optic futures could be secured while simultaneously providing young - and older - with work that anyone would be able to look back on with pride; work that would pay instead of unemployment or other Federal, state, or local aid. Work like our grandfathers were proud to point to and say, "I built that!"

Imagine large tent cities where CCC 'Conservants' come in after a disaster and help communities clean up and rebuild in a matter of weeks rather than long months, or even years like after Katrina. 

Imagine government and industry partnering to provide Master Builders, Master Electricians, Master Masons, Master Plumbers, Master Roofers, Masters of all sort to train apprentices - Conservants - in a trade that they can use the rest of their lives and which will always be needed. 

Imagine that people learn to work together as one rather than pulling each on his own end of the rope so that nothing ever gets done. Imagine those Conservants going back to their communities after their 1-2 years of service to the republic and rather than sowing seeds of discontent, become the new voices of reason, just as millions of our brave warfighters have learned in their times of service.

The Great Recession was far deeper than almost anyone knew. We can point fingers, or we can fix it, but an industrious hand has no time for pointing. 

We have a national need. We have millions still out of work. We have gridlock in Washington, DC. And we have a proud history written in stone, wood, and forestland, the Crown Jewels which are our National Parks. The enduring structures built by our forefathers who served in the CCC are signs that when America wills it, we can - literally, if need be - move mountains. Our will can also protect them. Either way, it takes willpower to do it.

We don't have these testaments to the strength of our American resolve because our leaders thought small. On the contrary, they thought large, they thought in terms of centuries rather than decades, and they thought to wield the greatest weapon in our American arsenal in the war against apathy: American grit.

What we need is a President with the same, built from the steel that Detroit once hammered into the finest cars in the world. We need a President who can grip the reins of this mighty American beast and lead us down the path of renewed national service. 

He or she will certainly face opposition, mainly from Big Business whose current leaders are so blinded by short gains that they can't see the long game. That President will need to channel the man who championed our national park system - Teddy Roosevelt. That President will need to wield the bully pulpit if necessary and not back down from using it. He or she will need to lash opposition with the whip of public shame for failing to take up the cause until such time that they shrink from view and either join the cause, or retire in shame.

Between FEMA, our nation's military, and volunteers with needed skills who can teach Conservants, we can form a cadre.

There are over 11 million unemployed Americans. No single person or politician is to blame for that; we all share in that burden, and in the responsibility for its cause. But it's time to move on. This is how we do it.

       

Some of you will no doubt say that it will cost too much. I answer that by saying that we're already paying it, we should get something for our money. This will have the added value of an ongoing national service program that can help train those who have no plans for college, or help those who do set aside a special educational fund created just for Conservants.

Yes, it will be an enormous undertaking. Yes, it will require building a cadre. Yes, it will require purchasing equipment or repurposing military equipment and then letting our military have the new replacements.

Yes, it will take resolve. Yes, there will be a rocky path. Yes, there will be corruption. Yes, there will be dissent. Yes, there will be every sort of crime committed by the same demographic wherever they are.

Yes, we can do it.

Or, we can sit on our hands and hope this crisis fixes itself.

A Path To Our Republic's Future - Learning To Pull As One

We were taught, and we taught our children, that individualism is the highest form of freedom, but we failed to learn the lessons that our parents and grandparents learned from the Great Depression and two World Wars, times that brought the republic together through national service, much of which was in the military.

We've forgotten that the infrastructural backbone of our nation was built in part by the CCC or Civilian Conservation Corps. The Corps built roads where none previously existed, bridges that span our nation's waterways and chasms, and the built-to-last structures we see in our National Parks and National Forests. Along the way, people learned trades that served them well the rest of their lives, they helped build the engine which powered America's greatest growth boom, and they often made friends for life serving alongside their fellows. They learned to pull together rather than pull apart.

I envision a modern CCC wherein every able-bodied citizen - and I consider many who are deemed 'disabled' to be able to help as they may - serves 1-2 years depending on job skills and possibly the ability to "re-enlist" for 1 term of 1-2 years, all of whom help our republic recover from the deeply-damaging Great Recession. I see Conservants help to rebuild our parks, roads, and bridges, and help lay a network of fiber optic trunks and dark fiber that will continue to serve us long into the future. I see them helping lay tens of thousands of miles of underground power cable, bringing electricity from the great wind farms of the Midwest and West to our cities and rural areas not capable of generating enough wind energy to meet their own needs. I see them building solar collection farms. I see them helping to clean up toxic waste dumps. I see Conservants laying the bricks and mortar on new government buildings built in a grand fashion to last rather than the brick-facade, steel building, temporary structures we now see. These would be monuments to the CCC's past and future accomplishments, built in a manner that will allow them to be flexible for future remodeling and which will stand to remind us that universal service is a boon for our society.

We see the path that crass commercialism, rampant runaway capitalism, and mass consumption has taken us down, all of what we've wrought being the result of individualism. A new CCC would again show us what the value of teamwork can accomplish. It would show us that it's far better to get to know our neighbors than to remain fearful of them through our ignorance. And a new CCC would elevate our republic back to the top spot among nations, not through idle boast, but through the quiet acknowledgement that comes from one's peers at a job well done. We would again achieve a status worth emulation rather than revulsion, and would do so by means of care and tender concern for that we love rather than ugly show of force abroad.

Our republic still reels under the staggering weight of the Great Recession, an economic kill switch on our future unless we rewire our way of thinking. We need a boost from within rather than a loan from without. The time has come for us to return to a program whose grand achievements still stand as reminders of what we can do when we pull as one.

Neo-Naziism, White Supremacists, Dominionist Christians, and the US Military

Neo-Naziism was rampant in the military as far back as the mid-1980s, at least. Later, in the late-80s, our intelligence unit was conducting witch hunts for gays but left neo-Nazis, Aryan Nationals, and other white supremacists alone even when they had racist symbols clearly displayed. 

But that's probably due to the fact that our battalion commander was himself a racist. He despised gays and atheists and made no effort to hide it. His behavior toward service members of color was somewhat more mitigated, but it bubbled just beneath the surface on his cigar-chomping face. You could watch the muscles in his face twitch when he had to speak to any lower enlisted soldier, especially those belonging to groups he hated. 

In a unit whose roster was filled with soldiers with codeword security clearances and years spent learning foreign languages - both of which cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars collectively, and millions alone individually - he set soldiers against one another to ferret out any whose least characteristics showed up on his hate-radar. Soldiers with perfect records were ousted, even jailed, for the least homosexual infraction while he permitted fraternization, even marriage, between heterosexual couples, even when one member would fall into the other's chain-of-command.

His activities eventually caught the attention of Congress, a difficult low-point to hit for a battalion commander. He had managed to achieve the worst retention rate - that is the rate of re-enlistment, a crucial goal for intelligence units because of the money spent on up-to-yearlong background checks, clearances, language training, and other training, making re-enlistment, even with a $25-35K bonus, a real bargain for taxpayers - in the entire US military. Typically, intelligence units have a very high retention rate because of the specialized training, re-enlistment bonuses, and the fact that so much time is spent in uniform to achieve the necessary skills that the lure of retirement may only be a single re-enlistment hitch away.

So, when you walked through the barracks rooms - in buildings built by Hitler specifically for his SS troops, the original Nazis - and saw swastikas and other neo-Nazi paraphernalia displayed, you knew why those displaying it could sneer at your recommendation to take it down: They had the full support of their battalion commander. 

The battalion commander was a Dominionist Christian, as well. In the 2 or 3 experiences I had with those in the military, they also sympathized with the white supremacist movement. I don't know if that's a 1-for-1 ratio or if I found some overlap, but it has always struck me that Dominionists are white supremacists, also.

Extremist Dominionist Christians

Going back to the early-1980s at least, extremist Christians and now the Dominionist movement, have wanted to create "God's Army" within the framework of the US military. I served under an extremist Christian in my military intelligence unit in Augsburg, Germany, who was on a campaign to eliminate gays, atheists, Jews and Muslims from the US Army. Incidentally, he had the lowest reenlistment rate in the entire US military, so bad that it warranted a Congressional investigation. Not only was he discouraging good soldiers from reenlisting, he was robbing the military of valuable, experienced manpower - each linguist, for example, cost the military millions to investigate their backgrounds for the necessary security clearance, to train them in their target language, and for further training in the specifics of their jobs.

The 'War with Islam' this BBC article references isn't new, it's just more contemporary, and is just the tip of the iceberg of the larger extremist Christian movement.

Military discharge of gays prior to DADT

People forget that prior to DADT, it was simply illegal to be gay or lesbian and serve in the US military. When I served, our battalion commander initiated a witch hunt to eliminate gays, lesbians and atheists (while it isn't/wasn't illegal to be an atheist and serve, he looked for any excuse, discharging one linguist for being 2 pounds over the weight limit). Since I fall into 2 of those 3 categories, I was high on his list to discharge. Luckily, I was at the end of my term of service, so I left voluntarily, although he tried to retain me so that he could have a court martial. That would have resulted in incarceration at the Federal holding barracks in Mannheim, Germany. He made very clear what he wished to do, which worked in my favor. I was able to enlist the aid of the then-Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn, D-GA (who intervened only from a cost standpoint since my term of service was over), in order to get out without being jailed. The commander had gone to great lengths to carry out his witch hunt, using two junior enlisted men to seduce soldiers of rank in order to prosecute and discharge them. The plan was to claim use of force and fraternization although force was never used and the younger soldiers weren't in my, or any of the other affected soldiers' chain-of-command. It was a witch hunt, plain and simple.

Just after I left the unit and the Army, Congress sent a delegation to Augsburg to find out why this battalion had the lowest re-enlistment rate...not just in Europe...not just in the Army...but in the entire US military. Since we were an Intelligence battalion, US taxpayers had spent MILLIONS of dollars training each one of us, sending us to language school for a year or more, lengthy and entailed technical training, not to mention the year-long investigations into the soldiers and their families going back 3 generations for the required security clearances. He lost his command, but in an upside-down turn of events, went on to get his full bird (the rank of colonel). It was at that time (the late 80s, early 90s) that Fundamentalist Christians were infiltrating the military...all branches...in order to create what they thought of as God's Army. And that always made me wonder...if their god is so powerful...why does he need an army?