Sacrifice: An American virtue on rebound

The Founding Fathers had altruism in mind when they made the "pursuit of happiness" an unalienable right in the Declaration of Independence. John Bridgeland, former volunteerism czar under President Bush, writes in an upcoming book that the founders were not endorsing momentary pleasures fueled by the pursuit of material goods, "but the satisfaction that comes from a life dedicated to others and causes greater than ourselves."

Alexis de Tocqueville, in his "Democracy in America," reported in the 1830s that America was a giving nation. "Every American," he wrote, "will sacrifice a portion of his private interests to preserve the rest."

Nearly every American president has urged citizens to serve the country and each other. George Washington stated in his farewell address, "You should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness." In his famous "man in the arena" speech, Theodore Roosevelt said the conduct of every citizen matters to the health of the republic. Franklin Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps in the Depression to give desperate men new jobs and eroded land new trees. John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corps.

"On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country," Kennedy said in 1961, "I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete."

Silent on service
Then there's George W. Bush.

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In his State of the Union address after the 2001 terrorist strikes, Bush challenged Americans to commit at least two years "to the service of your neighbors and your nation" and created one of the largest service initiatives since FDR's CCC. But after the war with Iraq came, he went silent on service.

While an all-volunteer military is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan — suffering more than 4,000 U.S. deaths in Iraq alone, tens of thousands of injuries and scores of suicides — the sacrifice has been largely limited to the troops and their families. No rationing or blackouts that brought World War II to the homefront.

Bush thanks veterans all the time for their sacrifice, but he won't ask Americans to pay higher taxes to foot the war bill. Would it not be a sacrifice to pay more taxes now to protect future generations from mountains of debt?

FREE VIDEO A special comment on sacrifice Jan. 2: The BBC is reporting President Bush is about to announce a plan to increase troops levels in Iraq via a speech with the theme of “sacrifice.”  Keith Olbermann responds in a special comment. Countdown

MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann mocked Bush in 2007 for calling a troop increases in Iraq a measure of sacrifice. "More American families will have to bear the unbearable and rationalize the unforgivable," Olbermann said, spitting the word "sacrifice" out in disgust. "Sacrifice — sacrifice now, sacrifice tomorrow, sacrifice forever."

Politics of sacrifice
Wartime sacrifice is often uneven. The wealthy could buy themselves proxies during the Civil War, and during the Vietnam War, the well-connected could avoid the draft.

John McCain was held for more than five years as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war. He could have gone home earlier, taken advantage of his status as the son and grandson of Navy admirals. But he couldn't bear to leave behind others who had been imprisoned longer.

Many men, it was suggested, would have punched their ticket home.

"Yes," the GOP presidential nominee-in-waiting said, in an interview. "But I think many men wouldn't have. ... I really do."

McCain was on stage during the December GOP debate, but moderator Carolyn Washburn did not ask him the sacrifice question. Months later, she is still surprised that no candidate seized the moment.

"People," the Des Moines Register editor says, "want to serve."

"When you give of your time to serve your community in some capacity, large or small, you're a patriot in the true sense of the word," says former Sen. Bob Dole, who lost the full function of his right arm in World War II. "You don't have to be shot to make a sacrifice."

The reform generation
Which brings us back to Kelly Ward, the 27-year-old do-gooder, taking her Ivy League education and putting it to use battling the nation's ills, even as she questions whether this represents any real sacrifice.

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She is part of an uplifting cultural trend: Young, highly educated, highly motivated people are bringing their best-business practices to the world of national service — fighting bureaucracies, lobbying government and spending money like venture capitalists to address the nation's most vexing problems. They call themselves social entrepreneurs, and you can find them in the most desperate corners of America.

In many ways, Ward and her peers are more like the Greatest Generation than their parents' Baby Boom generation.

"This is the next reform generation," says E.J. Dionne Jr., a Washington Post columnist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about public service. "The metaphor I think about are the people who started out in service work in settlement houses before the turn of the last century."

Settlement houses offered social services — food, shelter and schooling — for the urban poor and immigrants buffeted by the industrialization of America. Jane Addams was the founder of the settlement movement in America; she spoke of and to young and affluent Americans who yearned to make a difference, and find meaning in their lives.

"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious, is floating in midair, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life," she wrote a century ago — speaking for her own generation and another in the distant future, one that hungers to pull together and help one another, to sacrifice and to serve.

The question is whether they'll be forced to continue to do so on their own, or whether the next president will lead them.

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