On Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:43:42 -0000, Frank Reid
wrote:

And joining the military is but one way to serve your country.

Forty, I agree with you 100%. "Serving your country" is not just
signing over that blank check for your life to the government and
putting on a uniform. At one time, there was a ROFFian at a clave
once that was having a crisis of concience. He was a lawyer and
didn't know if he was doing the right thing to server his country. I
opined that as a lawyer, didn't he swear to defend the Constitution?
Same thing that guys and gals in uniform do.
Serving your country is teaching young people at a college, being an
orderly in a nursing home, inventing some new thing that helps folks
do something easier, bagging groceries, protesting injustice, building
someones new home, voting.
Serving your country boils down to caring. Caring about what happens
to your neighbors and someone in some pest hole 10,000 miles away and
then doing what you can in your own way to effect a change.

I'd offer that the above good deeds you mention are not really "serving
your country," they are really serving its individual citizens or groups
thereof - a good citizen doing things for other citizens or living up to
the obligations one has as a citizen with rights. One could argue (and
accurately, IMO) that doing so in the US is very close to "serving your
country," but the fact remains, JFK's shtick aside, that about the only
way to (proactively) "serve your country" is to serve your _country_
rather than an individual citizen or groups less than the whole. IOW,
Cheney, various Bushes (both Presidents, Prescott, et all, but not Jeb,
et al), Bill Clinton (but not Hillary - who, by the way, Frank, was on
the Walmart board...), Bill Richardson (Sec. of Energy), John Edwards
(he was clerk to a Federal judge), every _federal_ employee, etc.
is/has "serving/served their country." Teachers, orderlies,
construction workers, etc. are not "serving their country" by virtue of
engaging in those occupations. As to lawyers, it would depend on their
practice.

As to serving in general, I'd offer that the US and other countries
might be better off if some servers stuck to serving fries with that
order and others served time...

And as an aside, voting is not serving your country, it's serving
oneself by exercising a right.

TC,
R


Frank Reid