This Sunday, April 27, our beloved President Clinton will kick-off a three day event he calls the “Service Summit.” The event is supposed to focus on how to get young people interested in serving others. The moral premise this is based on is the idea that it is better to live for others than to live for oneself.

In the past year we have all heard loud voices complaining that people just don’t care enough about the poor, the sick, the gays, the lesbians, the racial minorities, the dolphins, the rats, the trees, the streams, the rocks and so on ad inifinitum.

Several local and national busybodies have said that young people today are alarmingly apathetic and selfish. “If these young people today don’t care about what WE think is important, then they don’t care about ANYTHING important! Oh, if only there were a way to get those damn selfish young people to realize their own insignificance in the face of the suffering of others! How do we destroy their self-esteem and replace it with our ideal of having them groveling before the open sores of the diseased and the needy? Behold, the ‘Service Summit!’ It’s the answer we have been looking for! We’ll declare it’s importance by holding it in the city of our nation’s founding, Philadelphia! We’ll declare everyone’s dependence on each other by holding it in Independence Hall! We’ll deluge the media with our propaganda declaring how guilty you should feel if you don’t volunteer your life away to the sickness and failure of others! We’ll get them early, and give them incentives to be volunteers by following Maryland’s example of requiring community service of all high school students or they don’t get their diplomas! They will volunteer or else!”

This is real, this is happening, and it’s a little bit scary. What makes it even more frightening is the bipartisan agreement that service and sacrifice are good. The Clinton’s will be there, along with Colin Powell, George Bush and Nancy Reagan. I’ll bet Christopher Reeves will be there, too (he wouldn’t miss it for a chance to walk again). The most disgusting and the most frighteningly fascist aspect of this is the obvious coercion of the Maryland high school policy (which Clinton supports).

Ask yourself this question; since when did caring about your own life and happiness constitute apathy? I personally know several young, bright people who are intensely passionate about their own lives and their own happiness. If you value independence; if you value your right to your own life and happiness, don’t let this issue go unchallenged.

To those who say “how heartless of you,” I say it is not heartless, I’m just sick of you people trying to force others to live by your corrupt moral code; besides, who is the real heartless villain — the person who wants to give orders or the person who says “DON’T TREAD ON ME!” as a principle to be applied to not only himself, but to all others as well?

Scott Johnson

President

Objectivists at ISU