Monday, November 3, 2008

Bring Back National Service

During the period around the Vietnam War the drinking age was lowered from 21 to 18 and national services was dropped thereafter.
As a direct result of this a vast number of undisciplined individuals are now binge drinking,driving dangerously causing death,indulging in hoon behavior and becoming recalcitrant long-term unemployed. I am now so desensitized to these people on current affairs programs i could easily over react to them if i came across one.
Instead of allowing these people to get off with little regard to the consequences of their actions. We as society need to teach them discipline in the form of a Nationalised basic training of between 6 months and 2 years service including ,physical, ethical, moral training and environmental responsibility .
I work in a service industry and parents tell me that their kids are well behaved. well, i can tell you that is true only when they are in sight .
These parents suffer from the kings new clothes syndrome and never had the training to properly engage their offspring in responsible manners and ethics,which the religious bodies used to endow.
Most of these people are basically good human beings but have not had a good moral compass set for them.
As a society we need to act, not to impose penalties but to imbue a sense of common community, which is what national service is.
The forces provide many community benefits including engineering projects in isolated communities and we need to strengthen them by automatically inducting these offenders who have strayed.
Perhaps then we can live our lives in a civilized community free from intrusion on our rights to go about our lawful business.
When i visited Singapore last year i meet several local young people whom were law abiding citizens that told me the would comply with any demands from authority to get out of their 1 year compulsory national service .
Now i am not saying we should apply this to everyone but anyone between 15 and 60 years old that thinks they are out side of public decency or above society standards of contributing gainfully.
We as a society changed the drinking age and compulsory national services expecting a responsible response and they have not lived up to their end of the deal. Several night clubs in Australia have recognized that 18 to 25 year old are no mature enough to handle drink and made themselves exclusively over 25 year old venues. we as a nation need to recognize it as well.
We now as the feed up give fair warning that this can be changed back . Also we should seriously consider bringing back Drunk and Disorderly charges then enforce them with zero tolerance.
These measures will single handedly increase national productivity which will stave off a recession.
A national tree planting force could also use these people for environmental establishment of carbon sinks and revegatation in areas with high salinity.

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