ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 9, 1994                   TAG: 9410140029
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: B2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DUTY CALLS

THE JOB of President Clinton's AmeriCorps is to work toward making America's cities more livable. The opportunity is to bring diverse Americans together in joint effort and to cultivate an old-fashioned value called patriotism.

The job will be tough. The first 15,000 AmeriCorps workers sworn in by Clinton last month will staff 330 community-based programs, helping police patrol high-crime neighborhoods, tutoring and mentoring at-risk kids, escorting homebound old people to the store and children to school - safely past crack houses and street-corner drug deals - to name just a few.

The opportunity presents at least as great a challenge. The idea is excellent: Americans doing public service as a means of earning money for college. Ideally, this "domestic Peace Corps," as it is conceived, will bring together young people of different races, with different educations and life experiences, who want to serve their country. Like the military services, it is supposed to cause them to bridge their differences as they work toward common goals.

Unfortunately, while social divisions can't be any deeper than they were in the days of legal segregation, they are in some ways more difficult to close. They have become lines almost of honor; to cross them is to somehow lower one's self.

Such was the sad state of affairs reflected in the administration's experimental "Summer of Service" last year near San Francisco, where workers quickly divided themselves into black, Hispanic, Native American and gay/lesbian groups.

Organizers are trying to pick programs with a diverse social and racial mix, and to the extent that they succeed, AmeriCorps can work to help restore the principle that, beyond any hyphenated label, we are all first and foremost Americans.

The other threat clouding this opportunity to help imbue a new generation with a sense of civic responsibility and patriotism is the reluctance of some to pay people to do this work. As the critics correctly point out, many people are volunteering their time to do some of these things now.

But these critics would never argue that military service should be unpaid. And in the case of AmeriCorps, the compensation comes in the form of help toward a college education.

Working to restore security in America's cities is a job more dangerous than many military assignments. And if the battle is to be joined by Americans from all walks of life, it must support those who can't participate if they give their time away. 


 by CNB