After a generation raised by Watergate and Oliver North gave birth to another generation raised by Monica Lewinsky and Nigerian yellowcake, it’s no surprise that due skepticism of government has lapsed into utter cynicism.

But one also gets the sense that people don’t necessarily want to distrust government. People have just been conditioned to do so by scandal after scandal. At heart, very few people actively seek out reasons to dislike possibly the greatest system of representative leadership ever devised. We want to believe again.

And we’ve known the answer to how for a century.

William James, the legendary psychologist and philosopher of religion, ruminated in his The Moral Equivalent of War about the insatiable appetite for catharsis that many once believed could only be satiated by warfare. He proposed an alternative to the belief that the only ceremony of common experience that could unite a people and forge a strong nation was combat.

“The tradition of service,” he wrote. “And devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility.”

William James was a revolutionary in that he realized that a nation isn’t a place on a map with lines drawn around it. In the aggressive, empire-building world of 1908 this was no small revelation. Six years after James wrote these words, the world would be venting its own popular frustrations against itself, hurling the sons of Europe and America to their deaths by the thousand rather than recognize the ties that bind any person to any other person: that same shared experience, not towards war, but towards a better life. “The tradition of service.”

Just a couple of days ago complete strangers built flood protection for other complete strangers in Clarksville, Mississippi, the heartland of the United States. I imagine there was little sitting and ruminating on whether or not “the war” was worth the cost. I imagine very few people stopped to ponder whether red states or blue states were better equipped to survive a natural disaster. I’m positive everyone there worked to build a stronger and safer community, through AmeriCorps and through a commitment to a stronger republic. Not America, the place between Canada and Japan and Mexico. America, the three hundred million people who live and work, who make it through the darkest hours and greatest triumphs together every day.

This morning, I imagine there were few prouder places to be than Clarksville, Mississippi. Because Americans do care about one another, wherever they’re divided along political, religious, or regional lines. Never before has a program sponsored and funded by our tax dues had the ability to realize perhaps the greatest aspirations of a secular republic: a commitment to people as a whole people, a unified nation who mutually agrees that our neighbors are worth the effort. That’s why the kinds of national services programs fought for by ServeNext.org and others represent the crowning achievement of any civil society. We may not trust the government again just yet, but we sure do trust each other.

William James, AmeriCorps (all tags)

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Youth, Education & National Service

Road Trip With a Mission: Expanding National Service. AmeriCorps alumni and ServeNext.org members, are traveling the country by bus for the National Service Express Tour, hitting 30 cities in 60 days.

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