No you didn't. Regardless of the original wording, the meaning could easily be understood and you chose to take it out of context... or I should say you read that someone else took it out of context and thought it would be cute to post here. I'm not sure of your true motive beyond some weird personal satisfaction at being utterly wrong and having it pointed out repeatedly. I do know your aim was not to provoke debate and discussion. If that had been the case, you would have quoted the entirety of the text and phrased your post to generate a real discussion about service and citizenship responsibilities. That you phrased it as an implicit condemnation of Obama is... telling.
Did you read the entirety of the link before it was changed? The meaning was clearly different than what Obama had proposed in the past and the correction that was subsequently made. It clearly used the word "required". If the meaning could be "easily understood" why was it changed? Due to the difference between what was on the web site and what Obama had previously said, it was worth the discussion.
I'm not sure how I feel about compulsory "niceness" Be it through anti-discrimination laws, handicap access, or community service. Let people be who they want to be, if you suck at life, then don't volunteer. If you don't suck at life, then go be awesome and set an example. It's not super controversial, who can argue against having kids volunteer in their communities? I've even thought at one time or another that mandatory military service should be instituted (with of course career and medical exceptions). It giveth and it taketh away, on the one hand, you would probably prevent a lot of people from "falling between the cracks", but on the other hand there's a piece of our soul that dies with having the freedom of conscience taken away. I think the closer we get to a more mature, free, and enlightened society though, the less we will have to rely on governmental mandates for our citizens to do things like serve their community & country, or be nice/courteous to differently abled people, or tolerant/respectful of other races/religions, etc. Does this represent a step backwards or a step forwards for us? I think it may be both. We've got a really lazy, unappreciative culture growing. We are a society of grown up children, so maybe the only way to reverse that trend is to take a step backwards and treat them like children. Maybe sometimes we must regress in order to progress further later?
With all these nattering nabobs of negativism, it sounds like we need to get the re-education camps up and running as quickly as possible. We can count the time spent in re-education as part of their mandatory community service. Once everyone is back on board and loving America properly, we can all get along.
