Alan Keyes [a candidate for the Republican nomination for president] is correct in stating, in his March 4 op-ed, that “national service is an obligation of citizenship” — in a totalitarian dictatorship.
All life in a dictatorship belongs to the state. If the state wants nursing home aides, it forces you to collect bedpans. If the state wants you to risk your life in some pointless foreign war, it has the power to conscript you.
But national service is antithetical to the principle on which this nation was founded: the principle of individual rights. As the Declaration of Independence states, each person has “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
However, there is no such thing as partial liberty. Liberty does not mean a citizen is free for all of his life, just not for the two years after he turns 18, as Mr. Keyes recommends. Liberty means being entirely free, free of bedpan duty, free from a military draft, free from servitude.
The sooner conservatives like Mr. Keyes understand the true meaning of freedom, the better off this country will be.
