One thought leads to another

I don’t know how many of you watched the public television show “Carrier,” about life on board the USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier. The show ran in its entirety here in Maine over several nights a few months ago, and now they’re rerunning it in hour-long segments every week. I watched it the first time, and found it fascinating, although I occasionally felt they concentrated too much on a particular crew member (the young fellow with the pregnant girlfriend back home), and gave too much air time to the Pentecostal group, in the segment on religion on board ship. The Pentacostals seemed to be a very small group, out of all those people on board, to receive so much attention from the producers, and I suspected it was because their services were a little more “out there” than the more staid services of the other denominations.

I also took exception to the final segment, when the cameras followed some of the crew to their very homes and, it seemed to me, invaded their privacy to a really egregious extent. Of course, these crew members had agreed to be followed in this way, but I felt it made the show slip over the line into the unpleasantly voyeuristic...from the pleasantly voyeuristic, I suppose.

But overall I thought it was T.V. at its best: informative, while being entertaining. And one thing I learned, that amazed me, was how young most of these sailors are. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. And working at extremely demanding, stressful, important jobs. And doing a good job! They are still in many ways immature – one older sailor declares the ship is like one big high school – but the navy is teaching them discipline, and responsibility, and they are able to take a well-deserved pride in their contribution to the running of the ship.

Seeing this made me think of something else, the work programs established by Franklyn Roosevelt during the Depression. I was thinking it was the WPA I had in mind, but a dip into that highly useful if not always reliable People’s Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, showed me it was the CCC – the Civilian Conservation Corps – I was really thinking of. The WPA did have a number of work projects, that produced things like bridges, post offices, guidebooks by authors, what has proved to be invaluable photographic records of conditions of the time by various photographers, etc. But the CCC was especially developed to put young men to work. According to Wikipedia they planted trees, constructed shelters and trails in state and national parks, built fences, roads, including logging and fire roads, even installed phone and power lines. My father worked in the CCC for a while, and it was a godsend for him, as it was for many young men.

And I thought, why don’t we have something like that now? Something besides the military that could instill some discipline and a sense of responsibility into young people (have to include both sexes these days), something that would enable the young men, at least, to work off some of that energy and free-floating testosterone in productive ways. I’ve actually had this thought before, when I would see young men just hanging out, begging for the opportunity to get into trouble. Or I’d think about all those kids being destroyed in gangs, because they have nothing else that makes them feel important, gives them a sense of being part of something bigger than themselves.

And now I discover that we do have something like that! Again according to Wikipedia, 41 states have some form of a CCC program. So why don’t we hear more about them? How many young people are actually involved in them? Are these organizations going into the ghettos and recruiting? Hmmm...