79-0585722-8. This is my selective service number. I think of it when I read of Artyom Fyodorov.
Artyom was conscripted – kidnapped, to use his mother's appropriate word – into the Russian army on his way to work. Artyom is 23 and was a journalist studying law prior to his conscription-kidnapping.
When I turned 18 I received notice it was time to register for Selective Service. A soon to be college student of a somewhat nationalist bent, I duly complied and didn't think too much of the penalties for non-registrants. (They seemed too draconian to be true, like something out of Solzhenitsyn or Kafka.)
I soon received my Registration Acknowledgement Card. The outside label reads, "Here's your official Registration Acknowledgement Card." Below it is the number 18, the "1" a pencil with a candlelight above it – an obscene commemorative linkage in retrospect.
It's a new millennium, and the Selective Service System remains. Also in effect are the penalties: "If you do not register, you could be prosecuted and fined up to $250,000 and/or be put in jail for up to five years. Registration is also a requirement to qualify for Federal student aid, job training benefits, and most Federal employment."
It appears so innocuous; after all, unlike Russia, the United States government isn't seizing the young off streets to maintain hegemony in Chechnya. "Just sign it and get it done with," says the zeitgeist.
This isn't how a free society operates. America's sons aren't supposed to be threatened with a quarter of a million dollar fine and half-decade prison sentence for military abstention. Maybe a young man's father or uncle or brother or friend died in one of America's several interventions and resents the military. Maybe a young man just doesn't want to expedite his conscription in the event of a draft.
It's unlikely that a non-compliant individual would be imprisoned and fined to the fullest extent of the law, but that's not the point. The federal government says it could put an individual in jail until his early twenties and render him an abject debtor. A government that presumes such power has transcended legitimate purview; and it is the presumption, not the potential for application, that is paramount.
Selective Service is not without congressional opposition. Representatives Ron Paul and Pete Sparks have respectively introduced the Selective Service Standby Act and Military Selective Service Repeal Act. Unfortunately, their peers aren't hastening either's enactment.
After reading of Artyom's kidnapping I removed my registration card from my wallet. It's not an act of civil disobedience. Registrants aren't required to carry their cards.
No, I'm not going to burn my card in some vapid countercultural protest. I'll leave it on my desk, a reminder of the former Republic.
January 31, 2001
Myles Kantor lives in Boynton Beach, Florida.
