I am one of the
thousands of returned Peace Corps volunteers that Chris Matthews of
MSNBC predicted would support Barack Obama after he lit the fuse in
Iowa. But I had already been tapped by Harris Wofford, a
Kennedy-era warhorse and director of the Peace Corps program in
Ethiopia, who is now stumping college campuses for Obama. About a
month ago, Wofford announced that Obama’s message of hope and
challenge was the only one that speaks to young Americans — and
old Peace Corps volunteers.
It will probably sound corny
to young people, but 42 years ago, our Peace Corps group sang
“Gonna Climb a Mountain” as we flew across the United
States in an old DC-8 on our way to Turkey. And I once linked arms
with a thousand folks and sang “We Shall Overcome” in a
black Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. You don’t get that
kind of tingle from a big check or new car.
I’ve
been waiting decades for that feeling to come back, rejecting
politicians from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton who’ve said
that money and the profit motive are the best and most efficient
means of organizing human societies. I’ve nothing against
business and profit, but they never seemed the most important
things in life. It probably started with my Minnesota Lutheran
parents, who taught us that family, friends, church and a good
education were important. Mom always worked, sang in community and
church choirs, and taught Sunday school. We took to heart her story
about the college scholarship she couldn’t use because she
had to work full time.
The Depression got in the way of
dad’s college education, too. He had jobs and several
businesses, but what I remember most was his insatiable curiosity
and all the magazines in the house — Look and Life, Popular
Mechanics and Popular Science. There was a photo studio and
darkroom in the basement where we created Christmas cards for the
whole town, and a radio and TV repair shop took up a corner of the
patio. We four kids went to college in part to make a living at
secure jobs, but also to discover interesting work, to use our
God-given minds. Two of us went to the Peace Corps.
It
may have been an advertising cliché, but the Peace Corps was
the “hardest job you’ll ever love.” I still laugh
about my 22-year-old self and four other volunteers getting on a
train in Ankara and heading out to remote villages in eastern
Turkey with all of three months of training. It was supposed to be
a 24-hour ride, but it became 48 hours after a train derailed ahead
of us. So there we were in the middle of the night, packing our
worldly belongings and CARE toolkits along a lantern-lit path to a
train on the other side of the wreck. Each of us stayed for our
two-year hitch, living with people who taught us their language,
opened their lives to us and used us to help improve life in their
villages.
I easily avoided going to Vietnam: I was 26 by
the time they started drafting everyone, but I marched on the
Pentagon in protest and supported what the Peace Corps tried to do
around the world by testifying in Congress to this amazing fact:
The Peace Corps budget for one year amounted to what we were
spending in one day to fight the war in Vietnam. Eventually, I
found a community development job with the Extension Service in
Wallowa County,Ore.
The job was supposed to be a short
break on the way back to some bigger work overseas or maybe back in
Washington. But Milton Friedman’s laissez-faire economics,
David Stockton’s trickle-down economics and corporate
capitalism were making the wider world unpalatable. Meanwhile, in
Wallowa County, I found that liberals and conservatives, Mormons
and Methodists, could get together to make the 4-H program work. We
could form basketball leagues, food co-ops, soccer programs and
about the finest little ski run that anyone could ever want.
I skied it last Sunday, zipping down that hill with a
couple of friends who’d helped build and maintain it. It
seemed to me, as I dodged 6-year-olds on snowboards and moms
guiding 3- and 4-year-olds down the hill, that it was almost as
good as the idealistic fire lighted by Barack Obama.
Rich Wandschneider is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He directs
Fishtrap gatherings for Western writers in Wallowa,
Oregon.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
