Summoning Students to Service
Northfield, Illinois, September 2020
Attempts thus far to return America’s 20 million college students to campus without flaring COVID-19 cases have been mixed, at best. Blame abounds. Students are dubbed selfish for violating public-health requirements. Administrators are faulted for ambiguous messaging and poor preparations. Parents are chided for impatience, and local communities for risk intolerances. And trust is corroding among all the key higher education constituents.
We need to reframe this vital matter. We are asking students to sacrifice at a key point in their growth, but with a jumble of apologies and admonitions. Why not, instead, appeal to the aspiration inherent in young adults to discover purpose beyond themselves? We are at war in 2020. The primary enemy to our civil liberties is the virus itself. As has been the case for centuries, we need our young to sacrifice to help win.
As we close out the summer, let’s consider pertinent wartime history of summer months alone.
On August 25, 1944, after unimaginable fighting, thousands of American and other Allied troops rolled into Paris to liberate it from Nazi rule. Sixteen was the youngest legal age of enlisted American soldiers in World War II, which claimed nearly 300,000 U.S. combat deaths.
In August 1864, Union troops fought and eventually defeated Confederate counterparts at Mobile Bay — a battle made famous by Admiral Farragut’s cry “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” The youngest Union soldier, drummer John Lincoln Clem, sought to enlist at the age of 10. Well over 200,000 soldiers perished on the battlefield in the Civil War.
And August 27, 1776, saw the largest clash of troops in the Revolutionary War. With the Battle of Long Island, General Washington and the Continental Army retreated to Pennsylvania, sacrificing the Port of New York to the British for the war’s duration. The average age of American troops was just north of 20. Roughly 4,500 U.S. soldiers died in the War of Independence.
Across generations, America has looked to our young to secure the blessings of liberty. So we find ourselves this year. We are again at war — not with hostile human powers, but the unsparing contagiousness of COVID-19. It reportedly has caused over 180,000 American deaths to date. As tyrants do, it preys disproportionately on the more vulnerable among us, like the elderly and the poor. If we cannot rally collective resolve to defeat it, then current trends predict the American death toll by December 25 — for a period less than one year — can surpass battlefield deaths across the entire Civil War.
What is different this time is the nature of what we must ask of our young — and it is to them that we direct these remaining words. To them: the request is not for the “last full measure of devotion” as in the Gettysburg Address. The request is for something more prosaic: wear masks, practice social distancing, limit the size of gatherings, and apply the Golden Rule. In exchange, your elders — whether leaders of venerable universities or parents entrusting you to those institutions — owe you logistical support in the form of testing and tracing, as well as better clarity and behavioral modeling. You may believe (and rightly at times) that many such efforts on our part need to improve. But today’s ask is of you. Overcoming these challenges requires sacrifice and accountability, including tempering liberties commensurate with your stage in life. As generations before all of us learned, with freedom comes responsibility, in this case to each other.
A youthful President Kennedy declared in his 1961 Inaugural Address that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century.” So it is today in 2020 with you, as “embattled we are” facing the “common enemy” of “disease.” Two years later he spoke at Vanderbilt University of the “citizen’s responsibility” and affirmed that “our privileges can be no greater than our obligations.” These events will define your generation. We urge you, our college-bound Americans, to raise high the torch that history has thrust to you. Many of you already have, to great credit. More of you are needed. Mask up, socially distance, gather in small numbers, and think first of your fellow Americans of all ages and walks of life. You then will lead in our shared victory. History’s trumpet summons you to become a new Greatest Generation.
John J. Hamill
[a modified version of this piece was published at https://www.smerconish.com/criticalthinking/summoning-our-young-to-serve]
