John F. Kennedy used to say about the Peace Corps ... “I gave Sarge a lemon and he made lemonade...” But Kennedy didn’t know that Sarge merely cut the lemon into pieces and gave each piece to a true leader like Bill Craig and let Craig and his fellow workers make the lemonade!!!
Bill Craig is my old friend from the Peace Corps, earliest days. I am delighted to be here with him. He was and is a highly motivated, competent and courageous man, a true educator.
We had crazy ideas in those days. But men like Bill Craig made them work. Listen to this project and idea: ---
We established an “Outward Bound” camp in the jungle recesses of Puerto Rico It was a place to toughen up our Volunteers for life in equatorial Africa. Everyone lived in tents or camping huts, ate the local food, climbed mountains, practiced swimming in hazardous conditions, and as a final test, everyone was dropped off blindfolded with no food in a remote, unsettled jungle area and required to survive and find their way home alone.
Bill Craig ran that place. The Volunteers went reluctantly but came to love it. Then we decided this toughening experience would be good medicine for all our Washington bureaucrats! Never had such an idea been broached to government office workers!!! There were minor insurrections here and there, but when our office girls and women proved they could survive, nearly everyone went. Bill Craig handled them all. Without him, government workers would never have been able to boast --"We, too, were Peace Corps Volunteers...” That was the spirit of those days. “We can do it! was the accepted slogan, and in Bill Craig’s case that slogan was accurate...He did it! Everything he was asked to do and more! He was part of that famous “New Frontier” spirit: “We can do it ... Together, we can overcome...”
We were the “we” Generation ... Not the Me Generation... But despite the profound differences between “we” and “me” ethics, I think there are some realities which will help Americans to come together again. For example, -
Today we are all graduates. You have just earned a diploma attesting to your specific progress in the intellectual life. You deserve praise; you have worked hard. You have focused your brains and your spiritual powers on the achievement of a specific goal. You, and especially your parents and your husbands and wives, deserve congratulations for your success. You have truly graduated to a higher realm of action and authority.
But you and I, all of us, “we”, young or old, should realize, that all of us are living in revolutionary times. “We” face together the fact that graduations, changes, conversions take place all the time.
Two days ago, the Black, Chief Executive of Wayne County (Detroit), in Michigan, became a Republican. He may be the first, Black, political leader to take that leap. A week ago, former Democratic Congressman from Texas, Ken Hance, did the same. He joined former Democrats like Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and thousands of white, Southern males who have given up on the Democrats and joined the Reagan Revolution, Richard Nixon on “20/20” described my brother-in-law, Ted Kennedy, as if he were only a vestigial remainder of an earlier era, a political dinosaur, so to speak, destined for extinction, because it was implied he cannot change. Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, Evans and Novak, Pat Buchanan, Jerry Falwell, George Will, and our old friend, Adam Smith, are among representatives of the current world view and ethic of life. Some of them are graduates ---especially Ronald Reagan--- of the New Deal, Fair Deal era. They intone the names of those old saints of the Democratic Party; FDR and Harry Truman. Even John F. Kennedy, (He of the hated name), is invoked for his tax cut in 1962, his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, his courage in the Cuban Missile Crisis, his determination with the Berlin Airlift, his unequivocal pledge to pay any price to preserve liberty.
They have tried to co-op Kennedy, Jeane Kirkpatrick has switched. Patriotism has been equated with militarism. Individual wealth and conspicuous consumption have been made fashionable. Individual taxes on the rich have been reduced. And as a result, the USA has more millionaires than ever.
Times have changed. People have changed. Conversions are common!
To the Yuppie generation, this is all extremely exciting and encouraging. The whole era 1940-1980 (your era) is resplendent with American triumphs. Were it not for LBJ and his Viet-Nam debacle, we Americans could truthfully say we are the masters of the world, and soon-to-be, masters of outer space, too. Sure, the Russians exist, but theirs is a fading, evil empire, economically backward, politically oppressive, morally corrupt, and destined to collapse if only we remain strong. America’s Century has only begun!
California, both northern and southern, is a genuine center of this new outlook and ethic. Nixon and Reagan are both Californian products; and Earl Warren has been forgotten. Silicon Valley is here. The aerospace industry is here. The Livermore Labs are here. The celluloid world is here. The Bank of America is here. The most populous State is here. The weather is here. Pebble Beach golf, world-class tennis, Joe Montana, Fernando Valenzuela, Steve Garvey, and the Nobel Prize Winners are here. Stanford is here; Cal Tech is here; Berkeley is here; UCLA is here; and the Monterey Institute of International Studies is here!
What else is there? Why can’t everyplace be like California? Why can’t all those others be like us? Why can’t women be more like men?
Many say -- the answer is simple: -- they can! Women are becoming more like men. Working in the same jobs as men ... Wearing clothes like men...Talking like men...Joining the army and navy like men.
In fact, the entire world is becoming the same. Tokyo, New York, L.A., Hong Kong, Bangkok, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Rio and Caracas, all have many of the same restaurants and hotels, the same cars, the same clothes, the same hopes, the same hang-ups. International trade and finance; international law and international accounting; international crime, drugs and terrorism; international travel and pleasure -- all these new realities make an alluring, pleasure-filled world for all of us “graduates”, for all of us who have arrived!
Was there ever a better time ... for us? Probably not.
We have the privileges, the power, the perquisites, the possessions. No wonder “conservatives are increasing in numbers. No wonder we want things to stay as they are. We are on top. And we want to stay there.
There’s only one small problem. “We” are only about 25% of the world’s population!! 75% of all living human beings are not well-fed, well-housed, or well clothed. They are not living in California. Their women are not becoming more like men. Their numbers and their poverty are increasing faster than ever in history.
--800,000,000 human beings are living in “absolute poverty” That’s what the World Bank tells us.
--50,000 children die of starvation every days That’s more than 18 million a year. That’s twice the number of Jews and Christians killed in Hitler’s Holocaust.
--Even in the USA 10 million human beings have fallen into poverty since Ronald Reagan’s election. The last five years have seen the greatest increase in poverty since our Government started making the computations.
--In the U.S.A. over the last five years more children have died from poverty than the total number of American battle deaths in Viet-Nam! Maybe we need another War Memorial in the nation’s capitol -- a memorial to those who have died in our war against our nation’s poor.
These are not happenstances. Programs for the poor have been reduced twice as much, proportionately, as social programs for the non-poor. $57 billion has been taken from the poor and spent elsewhere... Someone has to pay the interest on the deficit ... Why not the poor?
Just yesterday it was revealed that a poor family with two, income-earning adults, and a total of $10,613 a year, suffered a 5-times tax increase, as a percentage of income, in the last 5 years. That one family paid more in taxes than Boeing, G.E Dupont, Texaco, Mobil and AT&T, altogether paid, in 1983, when they reported $13.7 billions in profit.
We don’t talk much about these facts on poverty in the U.S.A.. The extraordinary increase in poverty in the last few years is practically unknown. We, and the Yuppies, prefer to discuss stock market and retail sales figures, price-earning ratios, the immense size of our Gross National Product, and the value of the dollar.
But, often, we miss on who is getting what ... The poor in this world outnumber the rich not just by millions but by billions. And their numbers are growing, exponentially!
All of you graduates are experts in languages. You can communicate across all linguistic barriers. You have an unparalleled chance to convey a message across the world and to all peoples of the world. What message will you send to this world I’ve just described?
Will it be simply: ----
Follow us ... Follow the USA’s example...do it yourself...the way we did it.
How can “they”? The poor, uneducated, ill-fed majority? And if they can’t follow our examples, how long will they let us in the USA alone consume 25%-30% of the world’s total resources -230,000,000 of us using 25%-30% of the resources, while four billion, 200 million other human beings compete for what is left over. How long will those inequalities be accepted?
Everyone has his or her own answer to the world’s destitution and poverty.
Reagan says simply: --- Get government off our backs and prosperity will come. “Freedom for entrepreneurs” is another rallying cry. Economics growth will solve the poverty problem. We can grow our way out of here, and overseas. We need only release entrepreneurs, free up market, accept dis-investment and unemployment in order to create the new wealth and new jobs need by all.
It’s an appealing slogan. It helps to explain Reagan’s great electoral victory. But what about these facts: ----
- Only 53.2%of the eligible voters in the USA voted in the Reagan “landslide.” So the President’s so-called “mandate” actually came from us and people like us. Why didn’t 47.4% of all those citizens of voting age go to the polls? Have they given up hope for change? Are they all simply satisfied and listless? Or is there a time bomb ticking in our ghettos, in our industrial heartland, along our borders…..?
- Another Question: -- How can the Third World Countries ever repay their debts? One day won’t they simply say “No...We can never get out of debt, so we won’t pay ... anymore. We’re tired of being your serfs.” Don’t you think the Russians know these financial facts? Don’t you think they know our whole financial system could collapse if Mexico, or Brazil, or the Argentine, or Venezuela said “No.... We wont go on paying...”
- Another Question: -- Can deterrence guarantee peace ... forever? Are we safe even to the year 2,000? Must all human life -- especially the lives of our children -- remain a permanent hostage to the nuclear arms we already possess by the tens of thousands at costs of trillions of dollars? Have those weapons become the false gods of the 20th Century? Do we in fact worship the security we think we get from our reinforced concrete silos and the fearful forces within each of them? Have these silos become our “tabernacles of the most high”? And is our President the High Priest who alone has the key to unlock those tabernacles with their awesome, god-like powers?
- Is anyone here present truly confident that we lucky graduates all of us, everywhere in the USA, have got the knowledge, humility, and wisdom to protect humanity from nuclear war, from international hunger and poverty, from financial collapse, ... all by ourselves? Can we Americans claim “we can save the world”? Trust us. Trust our system. Trust our judgment and all will be well. Can we confidently say that?
You graduates here today, you Masters of Languages and of International Affairs, can easily reply:
We don’t have to grapple with such problems.
We’re technicians ready to work and trained to deal with the complexities of specific problems. But we are not strategists or generalists. We’ll leave the big issues to those elected to deal with such matters.
If you so decide, I suggest you will be failures. You will fail your opportunities. You will fail your wives and children. You will fail your country. You will fail humankind.
You need not be so timorous. You have the intellect, the health, the technical preparation, and the opportunity to participate in leading the world, economically and politically, and most important, spiritually.
How?... In a thousand ways!
There are hundreds, yes literally hundreds of private groups, large and small, religious and secular, all working to bring about economic and spiritual development, or even radical but peaceful changes? All these independent, private groups need you!
Just one example: -
“Special Olympics” -- the new international program for the mentally retarded. A million contestants compete in “Special Olympics"-year around -- in 60 countries. 500,000 persons serve as volunteers. “Special Olympics” needs translators and energetic young leaders everywhere. Why shouldn’t you be one of them?
In “Special Olympics,” the Communists from Poland or Cuba compete in friendly fashion with “free-world contestants. Israelis work with Jordanians, Northern Irish are joined with southern Irish. “Special Olympics” is almost a miraculous development in a hardened, materialistic, world, “Special Olympics” works all over the USA and all over the world, But it is only one, private sector initiative where you are needed... There are dozens more.
Foreign countries need you, and your expertise. Especially Third World countries need you, Is it asking too much for you to serve overseas in the private sector as our military forces serve overseas for defense purposes? Your presence abroad would be proof that highly qualified individuals are willing to serve the world community and help save the world for us all. That’s what the Peace Corps does. The Peace Corps needs you.
The overseas operations of all the Christian churches need you. They work mightily to keep the world together. You can help them.
I could go on with a. litany of organizations where you could serve with distinction …within the USA and overseas. But you and you alone must decide.
At the beginning of our Republic there was a sense of high, even lofty, purpose which moved citizens to serve their fellow men through government. Public service -- civic virtue -- a classic Grecian concept -- inspired men like Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Washington. Lincoln had similar motivations. So did Robert E. Lee, George Marshall, and Dwight Eisenhower. Robert McNamara gave up the presidency of Ford and devoted 25 years to public service at huge financial cost to himself and his family. So did Douglas Dillon as Secretary of Trasury. Those days saw Republicans and millionaires: --- men like McCone, Dulles, Bundy, Rusk, Bowles, Fowler, Gilpatric, Vance, Harriman ... millionaires working with a Democratic President for the common good and general welfare.
Nixon and Watergate changed the idea and ideal of civic virtue and public service. Self-service replaced civic service. Look at Paul Thayer, now a convicted criminal, who two years ago was second in command of the entire Defense Establishment! People like him go into government for what they can get out of it, not what they can contribute to it. Raymond Donovan, James Watt, Richard Allen, Ed Meese, Rita Lavelle, and many, many others have debauched the idea of public service.
That’s the heart of the question you also face. What are you willing and able to put into our social structure, into our community, into our government? Or are you interested primarily in what you can extract?
How you decide will determine the quality of our nation in years to come. I only hope you will follow Bill Craig’s example by giving your fellow human beings, and your government, the best that’s in you.
You can do it. All you need to do is start. Start right where you are! Start with the first project you see! Start with the first person or program that needs you! Don’t wait to be asked. Just start!
