Let’s face it: If we listen to the media or the government’s take on things, we live in dark and despairing times. A recent Horatio Alger Assn. poll even showed that 55 percent of high schoolers think there will be a draft in the near future. It’s a time when the color orange can send our brains AWOL and red can turn a normally intelligent and resourceful nation of people as maddened as lemmings racing the last 100-yard dash of their lives. While it may be the ideal lifestyle for some to live in a state of perpetual fear, it isn’t mine. I happen to like going to the grocery store or the movies without wondering whether I can duck and cover before a nuclear bomb obliterates everything around me. Unfortunately some people think that way and somehow managed to find themselves in power; they think the best way to defend our nation is through the continual use of force, and for that we need fresh meat for the ol’ grinder.

Senate Bill No. 89 and House of Representatives Bill No. 163 both aim to reinstate a draft. (You can read the full text of each of these bills by going to http://thomas.loc.gov and searching for S89 and HR163.) These aren’t your mama’s drafts: Women are fair game, college deferment is gone, and thanks to a “smart-border declaration” between Canada and the United States in 2001, the option of “conscientiously objecting” from Canada is gone. While both bills are grid-locked, they may be strategically tabled in wait of a special “lame-duck” session expected after the November election. A “lame duck” is a member of Congress who has been voted out of office and doesn’t have to worry about being elected again. They could pass a bill to reinstate the draft for the simple reason that they don’t have to worry about public outcry for their re-election campaigns. It’s like when you’re a child and you do something bad, then your parents tell you that you’re grounded and you keep on doing it because, hey, what else can they do to you?

Some people favor a draft. The most common argument is that all Americans should give back to their country for all the freedoms they have.

That is a load of poppycock. Democracy and freedom cannot be forced. How free is a country that forces its youths to pick up arms, fly across the globe and shoot at other human beings? That is not democracy, that is not freedom, and that is blatantly un-American.

The Constitution is a sacred document. It symbolizes the American people. We made a choice, and we chose freedom; we chose justice; we chose equality and truth. A draft blatantly goes against the Constitution, the very document that defines America. Amendment XIII, Section 1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

A draft is involuntary servitude, if not slavery, and as far as I can tell there is no crime that the American people are guilty of as a whole except for perhaps shirking our duties as members of a republic and letting madmen steal our society. The villains who partake in fear-mongering politics and who take our men across the seas unwillingly to die on foreign soil are the ones who are un-American. They are the ones who should be ridiculed, not the patriots who stand more for this country and for the ideals that it espouses, the patriots who conscientiously object, the patriots and activists who love this country so much they will prove it in the streets marching to show their pride in being American.

Be an American, buy a megaphone.

Julian Portillo, 18, is a sophomore at Kansas University.