". . . they're all worthless young punks . . ."

South Bend Seven is bothered by the groundswell of "compulsory volunteer" programs many politicians seem to be hankering for:

[. . .] these plans all amount to what Paul Thornton wisely labeled "generational welfare." Such plans are based on requiring service by teenagers or college students, presumably because they're all worthless young punks who wear baggy pants and listen to loud music all day, instead of pulling their weight (uphill both ways) like youngsters did back in the good old days.

I'm still waiting for the plan that requires volunteering* from able bodied retirees as a condition of receiving their social security checks, or requires a few hours a week of service from anyone getting unemployment benefits. This will never happen, of course, because it's clearly those rascally youths — who, by the way, probably need a hair cut and should definitely get off of our lawns — who are best suited for work without pay. Let them make the world a better place. We have better things to be doing.

I went to three different schools with some community service requirements, and there were some common themes amongst all three programs. One common occurrence is that people just found a sympathetic authority figure to sign off on wildly inflated numbers of hours served. This happened for almost everybody, even the people who did orders of magnitude more service than needed, because it's easier to get one person to sign one letter stating that you've put in 50 hours under their watchful eye, then get four different letters from four people each attesting to the 15 hours you actually did with each of them. At one school it was common to see fliers in the hallway promising multiple hours of service credits for less than an hour of time served.

The long-term result of all this mandatory "volunteer" programs is to devalue and discourage actual voluntary efforts, not to mention entrenching another Orwellian word-that-means-exactly-the-opposite-of-its-original-meaning.