Peace Corps Quotes

I think the Peace Corps is a fine thing, don't you?" he said. "Well," I replied, "it's certainly better than War Corps.

Smile on my face, rock hard dick in my pants, and some peace in my heart.

As a civilian, I know nothing about combat, the Marine Corps experience or modern man's struggle adjusting to peace after war. I only know what's been shared with me; confidences I would never betray, nor use as details in a novel.

Lissa lowered her voice and added, "I might not even go to school anyway. I might defer and join the Peace Corps and go to Africa and shave my head and dig latrines." "Shave your head?" I said, because, really, this was the most ludicrous part of the whole thing. "You? Do you have any idea how ugly most people's bare heads are? They've got all kinds of bumps, Lissa. And you won't know until it's too late and you're flat-out bald.

The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops.

The secret to living fully is to find your passion and pursue it.

When the ancient Romans would conquer a new place or a new people, they would leave the language and the customs in tact – they would even let the conquered people rule themselves in most cases, appointing a governor to maintain a foothold in the region.” Wilson leaned against the whiteboard as he spoke, his posture relaxed, his hands clasped loosely.“This was part of what made Rome so successful. They didn't try to make everyone Romans in the process of conquering them. When I went to Africa with the Peace Corp, a woman who worked with the Corp said something to me that I have often thought about since. She told me 'Africa is not going to adapt to you. You are going to have to adapt to Africa.' That is true of wherever you go, whether it's school or whether it's in the broader world.

Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist who has been carrying out a project studying the archipelago of US overseas military bases. She made the fascinating observation that almost all of these bases organize outreach programs, in which soldiers venture out to repair schoolrooms or to perform free dental checkups in nearby towns and villages. The ostensible reason for the programs was to improve relations with local communities, but they rarely have much impact in that regard; still, even after the military discovered this, they kept the programs up because they had such an enormous psychological impact on the soldiers, many of whom would wax euphoric when describing them: for example, “This is why I joined the army,” “This is what military service is really all about—not just defending your country, it’s about helping people!” Soldiers allowed to perform public service duties, they found, were two or three times more likely to reenlist. I remember thinking, “Wait, so most of these people really want to be in the Peace Corps?” And I duly looked it up and discovered: sure enough, to be accepted into the Peace Corps, you need to already have a college degree. The US military is a haven for frustrated altruists.

And as John F. Kennedy described the ideals behind what would become the Peace Corps, he issued a challenge to the students who had assembled in Ann Arbor on that October night: “on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country,” he said, will depend the answer whether a free society can compete. I think it can,” he said.

Walk your own path and be yourself

Those who do not appreciate the soldiers and instead pompously talk about peace, should try to live a single day without the soldiers.

Here’s what I’m selling—you leave the world a better place than when you entered it. That’s all there is. For us it means we take down bad guys. For the dude who owns Lafayette it means serving the best goddamned coney dogs you’re ever gonna eat. For some Peace Corps sap it means putting rice in some poor kid’s bowl and swatting the flies off him. It doesn’t matter what you choose, it only matters what you can make stick.

But my quarrel with the concept of maternal instinct isn’t why I never had kids myself. I was never particularly opposed to the idea of having kids—let no one say that I don’t love kids! It always seemed like an interesting future possibility, the same way that joining the Peace Corps someday seemed like an interesting future possibility.

Si Vis Pacem, Para Iustitiam: In order to have peace, you must first have justice.

The peace corps looks like peace corpse, and death isn’t a very peaceful thought to me.

The day I realized that I was getting hard for my stepsister was the day I signed up for the Peace Corps and made plans to leave the country.

She was a hippie teacher who worked in the Peace Corps in Nepal and had hairy underarms. Fucking gross. And that's just concerning the Peace Corps. Brad Wollack

She was a hippie teacher who worked in the Peace Corps in Nepal and had hairy underarms. F*&% gross..and that's just concerning the Peace Corps.

Son, you can do more good at Yamacraw than you could ever do in the Peace Corps. And you would be helping Americans, Pat. And I, for one, think it’s very important to help Americans.

John F. Kennedy deployed a chiasmus during his inaugural address—“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”—and thousands joined the Peace Corps.

This country has not seen and probably will never know the true level of sacrifice of our veterans. As a civilian I owe an unpayable debt to all our military. Going forward let’s not send our servicemen and women off to war or conflict zones unless it is overwhelmingly justifiable and on moral high ground. The men of WWII were the greatest generation, perhaps Korea the forgotten, Vietnam the trampled, Cold War unsung and Iraqi Freedom and Afghanistan vets underestimated. Every generation has proved itself to be worthy to stand up to the precedent of the greatest generation. Going back to the Revolution American soldiers have been the best in the world. Let’s all take a remembrance for all veterans who served or are serving, peace time or wartime and gone or still with us. 11/11/16 May God Bless America and All Veterans.

I have five flashlights and each performs its own trick. I have a raincoat with zippers and net material so I never get too hot in a downpour. I have a shelf crammed with books and a shortwave that speaks Arabic, Japanese, Dutch and Russian. They have mud huts with maybe a few chairs and faded pages of old magazines fastened to the wall. I ride my twenty-one speed Peace Corps-issue bike to Ferke not to save a dollar on transport but for the luxury of exercise. They ride in from their settlements on cranky old mopeds or bikes with a single cog because it's the only option. And they give me charity. I just stare at it - near tears. To refuse their offer would be pure insult. So I do the rounds again shaking hands with all the men in boubous saying over and over "An y che " Thank you.

Yet here was Morrie talking with the wonder of our college years, as if I'd simply been on a long vacation. ..I once promised I would never work for money, that I would join the Peace Corps, that I would live in beautiful, inspirational places.

I wish I had known—then, in Peace Corps, or in college—that the story didn’t need to be clean, and it didn’t need to be satisfying; that, in fact, it would never be clean or satisfying, and once I realized that, I would be able to see what was true.

I was never particularly opposed to the idea of having kids—let no one say that I don’t love kids! It always seemed like an interesting future possibility, the same way that joining the Peace Corps someday seemed like an interesting future possibility.

You are not wrong," Laurence said. He had assumed as much himself, after all, in his Navy days: had thought the Corps full of wild, devil-may-care libertines, disregarding law and authority as far as they dared, barely kept in check-- to be used for their control over the beasts, and not respected. "But if we have more liberty than we ought," Laurence said, after a moment, struggling through, "it is because they have not enough: the dragons. They have no stake in victory but our happiness; their daily bread and nation would give them just to have peace and quiet. We are given licence so long as we do what we ought not; so long as we use their affections to keep them obedient and quiet, to ends which serve them not at all-- or which harm." "How else do you make them care?" Granby said. "If we left off, the French would only run right over us, and take our eggs themselves." "They care in China," Laurence said, "and in Africa, and they care all the more, that their rational sense is not imposed on, and their hearts put into opposition with their minds. If they cannot be woken to a natural affection for their country, such as we feel, it is our fault, and not theirs.

Yet here was Morrie talking with the wonder of our college years, as if I'd simply been on a long vacation. ..What happened to me? I once promised I would never work for money, that I would join the Peace Corps, that I would live in beautiful, inspirational places.

My Walden was no walk from civilization.

If every citizen should recite their national anthem daily, you will develop love to serve your country better.

The natural state of man is war. I think that peace is an interval for preparation.” The novel is significant because

It is really a very risky, nay, a fatal thing, to be sociable; because it means contact with natures, the great majority of which are bad morally, and dull or perverse, intellectually. To be unsociable is not to care about such people; and to have enough in oneself to dispense with the necessity of their company is a great piece of good fortune; because almost all our sufferings spring from having to do with other people; and that destroys the peace of mind, which, as I have said, comes next after health in the elements of happiness. Peace of mind is impossible without a considerable amount of solitude. The Cynics renounced all private property in order to attain the bliss of having nothing to trouble them; and to renounce society with the same object is the wisest thing a man can do. Bernardin de Saint Pierre has the very excellent and pertinent remark that to be sparing in regard to food is a means of health; in regard to society, a means of tranquillity—la diète des ailmens nous rend la santé du corps, et celle des hommes la tranquillité de l'âme. To be soon on friendly, or even affectionate, terms with solitude is like winning a gold mine; but this is not something which everybody can do.

in order to have peace, we must first have justice. We cannot and will not negotiate with terrorists or their supporters. These murderers will not see a courtroom and they will not see the inside of a jail cell.

Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids (Daum, Meghan) - Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 368-369 | Added on Friday, May 1, 2015 11:17:34 PM I was never particularly opposed to the idea of having kids—let no one say that I don’t love kids! It always seemed like an interesting future possibility, the same way that joining the Peace Corps someday seemed like an interesting future possibility.

They hadn’t seen it coming, any of them. They were out here, risking their lives, fighting for peace and expansion and people’s simple right to live an ordinary life, and their own government had treated them like chess pieces.

I was proud to be with the workers of the Council of Federated Organizations and students of the Summer Project, to work with them through the Freedom Democratic Party to make democracy a reality. Those young people made up a domestic Peace Corps. Our nation had sent our Peace Corps volunteers throughout the under-developed nations of the world and none of them had experienced the kind of brutality and savagery that the voter registration workers suffered in Mississippi.

I’m going to build the biggest, most exclusive, most impressive S and M club in the world.” Søren said nothing at first. But he did look up to the ceiling and addressed a few words to it. “I suppose it wouldn’t have occurred to you to call him to join the Peace Corps, Lord,” Søren said, still gazing upward. “It had to be this?” “Who the hell are you talking to?” Kingsley demanded. “God. I was criticizing Him, so perhaps it’s for the best you interrupted. This is your grand calling in life? Your ultimate purpose? An S and M club?” “No,” Kingsley said, shaking his head. “Not an S and M club. The S and M club. And you’re going to help me, because it’s your fault I’m doing this.” “My fault?” Søren repeated, pointing at himself. “What leaps in logic did you take to lay this at my doorstep?” “You turned me kinky,” Kingsley said. Søren paused. “I want to argue with that assertion,” Søren said. “Oui?” “I said I wanted to argue with, not that I could.

Louie dug out the Bible that had been issued to him by the air corps and mailed home to his mother when he was believed dead. He walked to Barnsdall Park, where he and Cynthia had gone in better days, and where Cynthia had gone, alone, when he’d been on his benders. He found a spot under a tree, sat down, and began reading. Resting in the shade and the stillness, Louie felt profound peace. When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him. He was not the worthless, broken, forsaken man that the Bird had striven to make of him. In a single, silent moment, his rage, his fear, his humiliation and helplessness, had fallen away. That morning, he believed, he was a new creation. Softly, he wept.

The sniper is like a highly skilled surgeon, practicing his craft on the battlefield. Make no mistake: War is about killing other human beings, taking out the enemy before he takes us out, stopping the spread of further aggression by stopping those who would perpetuate that aggression. However, if the goal is to prosecute the war in order to achieve the peace, and to do so as fast and as effectively as possible, and with the least collateral damage, then warriors like Chris Kyle and our other brothers-in-arms are heroes in the best sense.

Out in the lost world were hundreds of soldiers who had been sent abroad before the end of it all and could not be brought home. In the wilds of Afghanistan and the ancient cities of Iraq, they were making their way. At bases in Europe, they were holding their ground against the locals only by firepower. When that ran out, they would be taken. Peace corps kids in Africa realized they could not swim home, would never see home again. Tourists all over Asia, the Caribbean, stranded in airports, forgotten in consulates, lived long enough to face the terror of permanence in strange lands. Cruise ships drifted full of plague dead, a few unlucky souls left alive on some.

You don’t mention what you’d like to study, but I assure you there are many ways to fund a graduate education. I know a whole lot of people who did not go broke getting a graduate degree. There is funding for tuition remission at many schools, as well as grants, paid research, and teaching assistantships, and—yes—the offer of more student loans. Perhaps more importantly in your case, there are numerous ways to either cancel portions of your student loan debt or defer payment. Financial difficulty, unemployment, attending school at least half-time (i.e., graduate school!), working in certain professions, and serving in the Peace Corps or other community service jobs are some ways that you would be eligible for debt deferment or cancellation. I encourage you to investigate your options so you can make a plan that brings you peace of mind. There are many websites that will elucidate what I have summarized above.

I had a powerful personal experience of this truth. A few weeks before the end of my Peace Corps time in Thailand, I was sitting quietly in a friend’s garden listening to him read from a Tibetan text called, in that early translation, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. My mind had become quite concentrated and at one point, when the text was speaking of the “unborn nature of the mind,” there was a sudden and spontaneous experience of the mind opening … to zero. This momentary opening to the “unmanifest,” a reality beyond the ordinary mind and body, had the force of a lightning bolt shattering the solidified illusion of self. Immediately following this, a phrase kept repeating in my mind, “There’s no me, there’s no me.” This experience radically changed my understanding of things. Of course, since then, feelings or thoughts of “me,” of a sense of self, have arisen many times, but, still, the deep knowing remains that even the sense of self is selfless—that it’s just another thought.

Well, it had been a good many years since I had thought myself very lovable, and I escaped to some degree this trap of shattered ego. I was lucky; I had found a village of people so poor and simple, so engaging, that I had been more interested in my feelings for them than in what they thought of me. And frankly, after eighteen years of farming in the Sacramento Valley, that terrible life-consuming rat race, I was desperate enough to accept almost any human relationship on almost any terms. Love is love, I decided. Just take it and don't analyze it away. "You're my friend; you're good; you give me pennies," some nameless kid from down the beach told me. My God, what is love in this whorehouse world of poverty? And was I shocked because I could buy love or because I could buy it with pennies?

Here’s another thing—I can’t get any cell phone reception here. I should let my family know I’m here safely. More or less.” “The pines are too tall, the mountains too steep. Use the land line—and don’t worry about the long distance cost. You have to be in touch with your family. Who is your family?” “Just an older married sister in Colorado Springs. She and her husband put up a collective and huge fuss about this—as if I was going into the Peace Corps or something. I should’ve listened.” “There will be a lot of people around here glad you didn’t,” he said. “I’m stubborn that way.” He smiled appreciatively. It made her instantly think, Don’t get any ideas, buster. I’m married to someone. Just because he isn’t here, doesn’t mean it’s over. However, there was something about a guy—at least six foot two and two hundred pounds of rock-hard muscle—holding a newborn with gentle deftness and skill. Then she saw him lower his lips to the baby’s head and inhale her scent, and some of the ice around Mel’s broken heart started to melt. “I’m going into Eureka today for supplies,” he said. “Need anything?” “Disposable diapers. Newborn. And since you know everyone, could you ask around if anyone can help out with the baby? Either full-time, part-time, whatever. It would be better for her to be in a family home than here at Doc’s with me.” “Besides,” he said, “you want to get out of here.” “I’ll help out with the baby for a couple of days, but I don’t want to stretch it out. I can’t stay here, Jack.” “I’ll ask around,” he said. And decided he might just forget to do that. Because, yes, she could. *

shortly I should be able to live at peace in my cottage, with all the twenty four hours of the day to myself. Forty-six I am, and never yet had a whole week of leisure. What will 'for ever' feel like, and can I use it all? Please note its address from March onwards - Clouds Hill, Moreton, Dorset - and visit it, sometime, if you still stravage the roads of England in a great car. The cottage has two rooms; one, upstairs, for music (a gramophone and records) and one downstairs for books. There is a bath, in a demi-cupboard. For food one goes a mile, to Bovington (near the Tank Corps Depot) and at sleep-time I take my great sleeping bag, embroidered MEUM, and spread it on what seems the nicest bit of floor. There is a second bag, embroidered TUUM, for guests. The cottage looks simple, outside, and does no hurt to its setting which is twenty miles of broken heath and a river valley filled with rhododendrons run wild. I think everything, inside and outside my place, approaches perfection.

They call me Mac. The name's unimportant. You can best identify me by the six chevrons, three up and three down, and by that row of hashmarks. Thirty years in the United States Marine Corps. I've sailed the Cape and the Horn aboard a battlewagon with a sea so choppy the bow was awash half the time under thirty-foot waves. I've stood Legation guard in Paris and London and Prague. I know every damned port of call and call house in the Mediterranean and the world that shines beneath the Southern Cross like the nomenclature of a rifle. I've sat behind a machine gun poked through the barbed wire that encircled the International Settlement when the world was supposed to have been at peace, and I've called Jap bluffs on the Yangtze Patrol a decade before Pearl Harbor. I know the beauty of the Northern Lights that cast their eerie glow on Iceland and I know the rivers and the jungles of Central America. There are few skylines that would fool me: Sugar Loaf, Diamond Head, the Tinokiri Hills or the palms of a Caribbean hellhole. Yes, I knew the slick brown hills of Korea just as the Marines knew them in 1871. Fighting in Korea is an old story for the Corps. Nothing sounds worse than an old salt blowing his bugle. Anyhow, that isn't my story.

In Healing the Masculine Soul, Dalbey introduced themes that would animate what soon became a cottage industry of books on Christian masculinity. First and foremost, Dalbey looked to the Vietnam War as the source of masculine identity. The son of a naval officer, Dalbey described how the image of the war hero served as his blueprint for manhood. He’d grown up playing “sandlot soldier” in his white suburban neighborhood, and he’d learned to march in military drills and fire a rifle in his Boy Scout “patrol.” Fascinated with John Wayne’s WWII movies, he imagined war “only as a glorious adventure in manhood.” As he got older, he “passed beyond simply admiring the war hero to desiring a war” in which to demonstrate his manhood. 20 By the time he came of age, however, he’d become sidetracked. Instead of demonstrating his manhood on the battlefields of Vietnam, he became “part of a generation of men who actively rejected our childhood macho image of manhood—which seemed to us the cornerstone of racism, sexism, and militarism.” Exhorted to make love, not war, he became “an enthusiastic supporter of civil rights, women’s liberation, and the antiwar movement,” and he joined the Peace Corps in Africa. But in opting out of the military he would discover that “something required of manhood seemed to have been bypassed, overlooked, even dodged.” Left “confused and frustrated,” Dalbey eventually conceded that “manhood requires the warrior.” 21 Dalbey agreed with Bly that an unbalanced masculinity had led to the nation’s “unbalanced pursuit” of the Vietnam War, but an over-correction had resulted in a different problem: Having rejected war making as a model of masculine strength, men had essentially abdicated that strength to women. As far as Dalbey was concerned, the 1970s offered no viable model of manhood to supplant “the boyhood image in our hearts,” and his generation had ended up rejecting manhood itself. If the warrior spirit was indeed intrinsic to males, then attempts to eliminate the warrior image were “intrinsically emasculating.” Women were “crying out” for men to recover their manly strength, Dalbey insisted. They were begging men to toughen up and take charge, longing for a prince who was strong and bold enough to restore their “authentic femininity.” 22 Unfortunately, the church was part of the problem. Failing to present the true Jesus, it instead depicted him “as a meek and gentle milk-toast character”—a man who never could have inspired “brawny fishermen like Peter to follow him.” It was time to replace this “Sunday school Jesus” with a warrior Jesus. Citing “significant parallels” between serving Christ and serving in the military, Dalbey suggested that a “redeemed image of the warrior” could reinvigorate the church’s ministry to men: “What if we told men up front that to join the church of Jesus Christ is . . . to enlist in God’s army and to place their lives on the line? This approach would be based on the warrior spirit in every man, and so would offer the greatest hope for restoring authentic Christian manhood to the Body of Christ.” Writing before the Gulf War had restored faith in American power and the strength of the military, Dalbey’s preoccupation with Vietnam is understandable, yet the pattern he established would endure long after an easy victory in the latter conflict supposedly brought an end to “Vietnam syndrome.” American evangelicals would continue to be haunted by Vietnam. 23

Don’t tell me every revolution is peaceful. Revolutions rely on the tireless work of faceless masses whose lives mean so little individually that their names weren’t known to their movements even when alive. There is no bloodless revolution, only necessary revolution, when a system becomes so deeply broken you can’t affect change from the inside. When the system itself has become calcified so permanently that change is not possible . . . that is when the knives come out. I used to believe, as others did, that we could work within the existing system, that moderate change was possible. But when you take away the ability of the people to effect change within the rules of the system, those people become desperate. And it is desperate people who overthrow their governments. The corps tell us each individual should reap the profits of “their” hard work. But the reality is the corps made their fortunes on the backs of laborers and soldiers paid just enough to keep them alive. The corps did not labor. Do not labor. The shareholders and upper management sit in their glass towers and drink liquor spiked with our blood. Instead of sharing that wealth with those who broke their backs to attain it, they hoard it like great dragons. Any human power can be changed by human beings. That is a truth, a constant. Humans can’t build power structures that cannot be destroyed. We are the power structure. There was a time when human beings believed they were their governments. They understood they had power over them, because they created them. They did not simply wait around for their governments to give them rights and freedoms. They demanded them. People should not be afraid of the corporations. Corporations should be afraid of the people.

Ad – Add               Ail – Ale               Air – Heir               Are - R               Ate - Eight               Aye - Eye - I                 B                            B – Be - Bee               Base - Bass               Bi – Buy - By – Bye               Bite - Byte               Boar - Bore               Board - Bored                 C               C – Sea - See               Capital – Capitol               Chord – Cord               Coarse - Course               Core - Corps               Creak – Creek               Cue – Q - Queue                 D               Dam - Damn               Dawg – Dog               Days – Daze               Dew – Do – Due               Die – Dye               Dual - Duel                 E               Earn – Urn               Elicit – Illicit               Elude - Illude               Ex – X                 F               Fat – Phat               Faze - Phase               Feat - Feet               Find – Fined               Flea – Flee               Forth - Fourth                 G               Gait – Gate               Genes – Jeans               Gnawed - Nod               Grate – Great                 H               Hair - Hare               Heal - Heel               Hear - Here               Heard - Herd               Hi - High               Higher – Hire               Hoarse - Horse               Hour - Our                 I               Idle - Idol               Ill – Ill               In – Inn               Inc – Ink               IV – Ivy                 J               Juggler - Jugular                 K               Knead - Need               Knew - New               Knight - Night               Knot – Naught - Not               Know - No               Knows - Nose                 L               Lead – Led               Lie - Lie               Light – Lite               Loan - Lone                 M               Mach – Mock               Made - Maid               Mane – Main               Meat - Meet               Might - Mite               Mouse - Mouth                 N               Naval - Navel               None - Nun                 O               Oar - Or – Ore               One - Won                 P               Paced – Paste               Pail – Pale                            Pair - Pear               Peace - Piece               Peak - Peek               Peer - Pier               Pray - Prey                 Q               Quarts - Quartz                 R               Rain - Reign               Rap - Wrap               Read - Red               Real - Reel               Right - Write               Ring - Wring                 S               Scene - Seen               Seas – Sees - Seize               Sole – Soul               Some - Sum               Son - Sun               Steal – Steel               Suite - Sweet                 T               T - Tee               Tail – Tale               Team – Teem               Their – There - They’re               Thyme - Time               To – Too - Two                 U               U - You                 V               Vale - Veil               Vain – Vane - Vein               Vary – Very               Verses - Versus                 W               Waive - Wave               Ware – Wear - Where               Wait - Weight               Waist - Waste               Which - Witch               Why – Y               Wood - Would                 X                 Y               Yoke - Yolk               Yore - Your – You’re                 Z

But that's hindsight for you: never there when you need it.

I can feel her smile against my cheek, and with our arms wrapped tightly around each other and our bodies connected, we both close our eyes, and for the first time in a long time, I sleep with complete peace.

It’s like the Peace Corps. But, you know, creepier. —D. Chernicoff, Yale Daily News (2006)

From the Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker Nesting Dolls The first stacked dolls better known as Russian Nesting Dolls, matryoshka dolls or Babushka Dolls, were first made in 1890 by Vasily Zvyozdochkin. Much of the artistry is in the painting of the usual 5 dolls, although the world record is 51 dolls. Each doll, which when opened reveals a smaller doll of the same type inside ending with the smallest innermost doll, which is considered the baby doll and is carved from a single piece of wood. Frequently these dolls are of a woman, dressed in a full length traditional Russian peasant dress called a sarafan. When I served with the Military Intelligence Corps of the U.S.Army, the concept of onion skins was a similar metaphor used to denote that we were always encouraged to look beyond the obvious. That it was essential to delve deeper into a subject, so as to arrive at the essence of the situation or matter. This is the same principle I employed in writing my award winning book, The Exciting Story of Cuba. Although it can be considered a history book, it is actually a book comprised of many stories or vignettes that when woven together give the reader a view into the inner workings of the Island Nation, just 90 miles south of Key West. The early 1950’s are an example of this. At that time President Batista was hailed a champion of business interests and considered this a direct endorsement of his régime. Sugar prices remained high during this period and Cuba enjoyed some of its best years agriculturally. For those at the top of the ladder, the Cuban economy flourished! However, it was during this same period that the people lower on the economic ladder struggled. A populist movement was started, resulting in a number of rebel bands to challenge the entrenched regime, including the followers of autocrats such as Fidel and Raul Castro. Castro’s M 26 7 militia had a reputation of indiscriminately placing bombs, one of which blew a young woman to pieces in the once-grand theater, “Teatro America.” A farmer, who failed to cooperate with Batista’s army, was locked into his home with his wife and his daughter, which was then set on fire killing them all. What had been a corrupt but peaceful government, quickly turned into a war zone. Despite of Batista’s constitutional abuses and his alliance with the Mafia, the years under his régime were still the most prosperous ones in Cuba’s history. Of course most of the money went to those at the top of the economic ladder and on the lower end of the scale a house maid was lucky to make $25 to $30 a month. History tends to repeat itself. Civilized countries that experience economically difficult times, because of greed by the elite and privileged few, become ripe for a civil insurrection. It is not enough to accept the first solution we encounter, but rather we must peel back the layers of onion skin to understand what has happened and how to rectify the problem. Usually things are not as simple as they seem, and to embrace the first person that offers a simple solution can plunge us deeper into an economic abyss. This is what happened in Italy and Cuba as well as Germany in 1933. Remember that Adolf Hitler was elected with a 90% plurality. Following a populist movement can be disastrous. Strictly adhering to a party doctrine, by the less informed, is outright dangerous. It is important in a democracy that people retain civility and are educated and knowledgeable. It is crucial that we understand history as well as the perils and consequences that are possible. Reading books like The Exciting Story of Cuba allows us to peel away one onion skin after the other, or open one nesting doll after another, until we understand the entire picture. What has happened in other civilized countries can happen here in the United States…. Beware!

My experience in India had a profound impact on me, shaping my entire life in many ways. I begin the book in 1969 in the Peace Corps and close it with a return to my India family in 2003. The novelist Peggy Payne (Sister India) says in a blurb on the back cover, "India sojourns, vividly recounted, are the bookends for the story of one man's profound and inspiring change.

How do you think poetry helps people? he’d ask, wanting the whole thing quantified so he could compare it to digging wells in the Peace Corps.

For aiding and abetting drug cartels suspected in more than twenty thousand murders, groups famous for creating the world’s most gruesome torture videos—the Sinaloa Cartel in particular, with its style of high-volume reprisal killings and public chainsawings and disembowelings, makes al-Qaeda look like the Peace Corps—HSBC got a walk. Tory Marone, for smoking their product and passing out on a park bench, got sent to jail.

There's nowhere to go from Hitler. It's a rhetorical dead end. Argument is over at that point. If you go there, you're now absolbing your audiences of all moral restraint, because who wouldn't kill Hitler? You can draw a straight line from these rhetorical escalations in right-wing media to the lunacies of the Trump era. If you can believe the Peace Corps is the SS, then why doubt Muslims in Jersey City were cheering 9/11, or question the logic of an anti-rape wall across the Rio Grande? Stupid is stupid.

I broke one terrible night when Rufo, Ramon's younger brother, arrived at the house begging me to bring medicine for Ramon and Ester, who were suddenly burning up with fever. Carrying aspirin and a thermometer, I walked up the beach through the waves at high tide, under a billion blazing southern stars, the most furiously beautiful night of my life. But the contrast of that night with the utter squalor of Ramon's house, the sweating bodies, the delirium, their childlike faith that now that I had come everything would be all right, the pathetic collection of objects they had piled in bed around them - a plaster of Paris dog with half the paint peeled off, a rusty flit gun, a jar of watermelon seed, a pail of ground corn for the chickens, a pair of worn-out gringo shoes, all their treasures - so knocked me out that walking back along the beach I began to cry as I hadn't cried since I was six years old. What finally made it funny was that I couldn't stop and h ad to stay on the beach for almost an hour, embarrassed to go wailing through the sleeping streets of Rio Verde, announcing that I was cracking up.

Additionally, I was grateful for the rule of law at home and for the American constitutional provisions that safeguarded regular elections and stable transitions between outgoing and incoming presidents and members of Congress.

The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient

The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient, and we weren't under any pressure to join.

Kezia’s fascination with the Peace Corps had been “trivia,” as had her much-

Kezia’s fascination with the Peace Corps had been “trivia,” as had her much-publicized romance with the Argentinian ambassador’s son three years before.

As a graduate of the Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, I am astonished by Tolstoy’s absolute mastery at describing battles and military tactics. If I were teaching military history in any country in the world, I would make War and Peace required reading for anyone who held any ambition for advancement into the officer corps. It should be on the night table of the leader of every country who wishes to send troops into war. No writer has ever described the horror and anarchy of battle with more authority. It is one of the timeless lessons of War and Peace that no one, not Napoleon, nor the Tsar, nor the Russian general Katuzov, has any idea how a war is going to turn out once it is unleashed. Napoleon

When the necessary is impossible but the impossible is necessary, when no power wants to own the World of Disorder but, increasingly, no power can ignore it, it is going to take these hybrid combinations of drones and walls, aircraft carriers and Peace Corps volunteers, plus chickens, gardens, and Webs, to begin to create stability in the age of accelerations. Since

When the British attacked Havana in 1762, Admiral de Hevia failed to scuttle the ships under his command. Thus, his ships fell into the hands of the British. The Admiral was returned to Spain where he was court-martialed, stripped of his titles and sentenced to house arrest for 10 years. Fortunately, he was pardoned three years later, on September 17, 1765. Reinstated he returned to active duty as the commander of the Marine Corps in Cadiz. He died seven years later on December 2, 1772, at Isla de León, Spain. Havana being under the rule of the British governor Sir George Keppel, the 3rd Earl of Albemarle, the British opened trade with their North American and Caribbean colonies, causing a dramatic transformation in the culture of Cuba, as well as bringing an increase to the population. Thousands of additional slaves were brought to the island under British rule, ostensibly to work on the new sugar plantations. The British occupation, however, didn’t last long, since the Seven Years’ War ended less than a year after the British arrived, and with the signing of the Peace of Paris Treaty the English agreed to surrender Cuba in exchange for Florida. In Britain, many people believed they could have done better, had they included Mexico and some of the colonies in South America, as part of the deal. The Florida Keys, not being directly connected to the Florida mainland, also remained in dispute, but it was not contested as long as free trade was permitted. After the deal was made with the British, Spain retained control of Cuba until after the secessionist movements were ended with the Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898. The United States Senate ratified the treaty on February 6, 1899. In 1793, many more slaves were imported into Cuba when French slave owners fled from Haiti during the Slave Rebellion, also known as the Haitian Revolution. This brought 30,000 white refugees and their slaves into Cuba. With their knowledge of coffee and sugar processing, they founded many new plantations. This period of the English occupation and French influx, although chronologically short, was when the floodgates of slavery were opened wide. It was at this time that the largest numbers of black slaves ever, were imported into the country.

She'd have no purpose in a world like this one,' I explained. 'Not now. Even if we did rebuild her-and if I thought we could, if I thought that would make you both happy...' I shook my head. 'In any case, with all that being beside the point, she'd be too big for how things stand in Thremedon now. So, the only other alternative would be to make her smaller- take that same spark she had, reduce her to something tiny enough to fit in your pocket, or in the palm of your hand. And that's all wrong too, isn't it? She wouldn't be the same. What you might have thought you could do- return to a time and place when the war was still being fought, when the Corps was still trying to win- it would require a different sort of magician. I don't think there's ever been one that powerful.

think-tank report promoted the idea of the federal government creating a national service-year program and “scholarships for service” as part of a domestic version of the Peace Corps. Recent college graduates would enroll for one to two years of paid voluntary service and be placed within distressed communities across the United States. They would be matched up with local development projects, nonprofits, charities, and schools. The federal government would also forgive student loans for the period of service. The National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, which was set up in 2017, proposed a similar idea in its final report in 2020. The commission advocated legislation to secure funding for national service and volunteering on a large scale that would enable young people

What strikes me as one of the most salient characteristics of the developed world is the presence of choice. Celebrate your freedom-of-choice by choosing often and well.

Future shock will not be found in Index Medicus or in any listing of psychological abnormalities. Yet, unless intelligent steps are taken to combat it, millions of human beings will find themselves increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environments. The malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality, and free-floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a foretaste of what may lie ahead unless we come to understand and treat this disease. Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one’s own society. But its impact is far worse. For most Peace Corps men, in fact most travelers, have the comforting knowledge that the culture they left behind will be there to return to. The victim of future shock does not. Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down suddenly in an environment sharply different from his own, with a different set of cues to react to—different conceptions of time, space, work, love, religion, sex, and everything else—then cut him off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar social landscape, and the dislocation he suffers is doubly severe. Moreover, if this new culture is itself in constant turmoil, and if—worse yet—its values are incessantly changing, the sense of disorientation will be still further intensified. Given few clues as to what kind of behavior is rational under the radically new circumstances, the victim may well become a hazard to himself and others. Now imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, an entire generation—including its weakest, least intelligent, and most irrational members—suddenly transported into this new world. The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale. This is the prospect that man now faces. Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.

Right-wing TV networks did not exist in 1917, but in that year was born a presidential tool even more powerful, a lavishly financed government propaganda agency that operated in every medium of the day: films, books, posters, newspaper articles, and a corps of 75,000 speakers who gave more than seven million talks everywhere from movie houses to revival tents. In addition, the federal government also attacked the press, both during and well after the First World War.

All I have I would have given, gladly, not to be standing here today.” The chamber became hushed. He had struck exactly the right note of sorrowful humility. It was a good start, George thought. Johnson continued in the same vein, speaking with slow dignity. If he felt the impulse to rush, he was controlling it firmly. He wore a dark-blue suit and tie, and a shirt with a tab-fastened collar, a style considered formal in the South. He looked occasionally from one side to the other, speaking to the whole of the chamber and at the same time seeming to command it. Echoing Martin Luther King, he talked of dreams: Kennedy’s dreams of conquering space, of education for all children, of the Peace Corps. “This is our challenge,” he said. “Not to hesitate, not to pause, not to turn about and linger over this evil moment, but to continue on our course so that we may fulfill the destiny that history has set for us.” He had to stop, then, because of the applause. Then he said: “Our most immediate tasks are here on this hill.” This was the crunch. Capitol Hill, where Congress sat, had been at war with the president for most of 1963. Congress had the power to delay legislation, and used it often, even when the president had campaigned and won public support for his plans. But since John Kennedy announced his civil rights bill they had gone on strike, like a factory full of militant workers, delaying everything, mulishly refusing to pass even routine bills, scorning public opinion and the democratic process. “First,” said Johnson, and George held his breath while he waited to hear what the new president would put first. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” George leaped to his feet, clapping for joy. He was not the only one: the applause burst out again, and this time went on longer than previously. Johnson waited for it to die down, then said: “We have talked long enough in this country about civil rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time, now, to write the next chapter—and to write it in the books of law.” They applauded again. Euphoric, George looked at the few black faces in the chamber: five Negro congressmen, including Gus Hawkins of California, who actually looked white; Mr. and Mrs. Wright in the presidential box, clapping; a scatter of dark faces among the spectators in the gallery. Their expressions showed relief, hope, and gladness. Then his eye fell on the rows of seats behind the cabinet, where the senior senators sat, most of them Southerners, sullen and resentful. Not a single one was joining in the applause. •

For the better part of a decade, I figured I was better off being slightly unhealthy and leaving the active pursuit of body-related matters alone. This all changed once I joined the Peace Corps, where it was impossible to think too much about my appearance, and where health was of such immediately importance that it was always on my mind. I developed active tuberculosis while volunteering and, for some stress- or nutrition-related reason, started to shed my thick black hair. I realized how much I had taken my functional body for granted. I lived in a mile-long village in the middle of a western province in Kyrgyzstan: there were larch trees on the snowy mountains, flocks of sheep crossing dusty roads, but there was no running water, no grocery store. The resourceful villagers preserved peppers and tomatoes, stockpiled apples and onions, but it was so difficult to get fresh produce otherwise that I regularly fantasized about spinach and oranges, and would spend entire weekends trying to obtain them. As a prophylactic measure against mental breakdown, I started doing yoga in my room every day. Exercise, I thought. What a miracle!

After Peace Corps, I kept at it. I was back in Houston, I had a lot of spare time, and I spent it at midday yoga classes at expensive studios to which I would buy discounted first-time packages and never return. This period, around 2011, reintroduced me to the world of American abundance. The first time I went into a grocery store and saw how many different fruits there were, I cried. At these yoga classes, I marveled at the fanatic high functionality of the women around me...I was not, at the time, on their level: I had been taking giardia shits in a backyard outhouse for a year straight, and I was flooded with dread and spiritual uselessness, the sense that I had failed myself and others, the fear that I would never again be use to another human being.

The Arizona spent the ensuing years of World War I deployed along the Atlantic coast, mostly on training missions. After the Armistice in November 1918, Arizona crossed the Atlantic to England and then joined the flotilla of warships escorting President Woodrow Wilson to peace talks in France. A second Atlantic voyage to France and across the Mediterranean followed. By 1921, Arizona had made its first transit of the Panama Canal and first crossing of the equator, and came to be home-ported in San Pedro, California, not yet engulfed by greater Los Angeles. High morale and esprit de corps are essential components in any military command, but particularly so aboard ships at sea. BB-39’s can-do motto quickly became “At ’em Arizona” and a newsletter with that name—at first crudely typed but increasingly polished as the years went by—was, as its masthead proudly proclaimed, “Published daily aboard the U.S.S. Arizona wherever she may be.”6

Even with his fancy parents who speak fluent English and a sister in the Peace Corps, Patrick isn’t above the stupid blue hair catcher. I feel like squeezing his face into mush.

As time passed, it grew easier and easier to let go of what I had. The reason was simple: I had a lot. Like most people who go overseas to do development work, I did so expecting to find out what it's like to be poor. But awakening to my surroundings after a few months, I discovered that that's not what happens. Instead you learn what it's like to be rich, to be fabulously, incomprehensibly bloated with wealth. No one in Kalambayi could afford to share more than I.

Pijkor didn’t mean “Peace Corps volunteer.” It meant “American living on the island for a long period of time, trying to help.” So

Like a new nation, Wikipedia inspires not only fanatic loyalty but also moral and civic dogmatism. Just as the U.S. uses its "Peace Corps" to rehabilitate imperial depredation with a bushy-tailed front group who teach ancient cultures how to take a dump, Wikipedia gives the radio-active bacteria mound of the Internet a fresh coat of paint.

I remember reading about these primitive initiation rituals in school. They had one where they take the kid way out into the wilderness and drop him off and he has to get back by himself without any weapons or tools. He’s just out there with his bare hands, digging up roots to eat, making fires with rocks and sticks or whatever. I mean, he could starve or a mountain lion could eat him or something, but that’s all part of the test. When he gets back, he’s a man. And not only that, he finds his Spirit Guide. Talk about embracing the weird. But nowadays they don’t do anything but leave you at home by yourself with a kitchen full of potato chips and soft drinks. Then, in your bedroom, you’ve got your TV, video games, and the Internet. What do they expect you to get from that? A big fat case of I don’t give a shit? These days, a kid has to go looking for his own initiation or make his own personal war to fight since the wars the atomic vampires throw are so hard to believe in. It’s like Ricky says—every time they trump one up, it gets worse. If I was in charge, it’d be different. You wouldn’t have to go to military school or get dropped off in the wilderness or fight in a war. Instead, you’d head off for what I’d call the Teen Corps. It’d be like the Peace Corps, only for teenagers. You’d have to go around and, like, pile up sandbags for people when hurricanes blow in and replant trees in deforested areas and help get medical attention to hillbillies and so forth. You’d do it for a whole year, and then, when you got back, you’d get the right to vote and buy alcohol and everything else. You’d be grown.

Like many Peace Corps volunteers all over the world, I found that the parent visit was a kind of revelation: suddenly I saw how much I had learned and how much I had forgotten.

Kennedy and Johnson had more to offer than bread alone. Initiatives such as the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress were intended to stimulate political as well as economic development.

Yet militarism was a more general phenomenon across Europe and throughout societies. In Britain small children wore sailor suits and on the Continent schoolchildren frequently wore little uniforms; secondary schools and universities had cadet corps;

He thought it’d be funny to open one of those Mars Corp boxes and grab a Snickers. Maybe he’s in a Snickers commercial right now? Maybe he was just hungry/angry. Getting Hangry? He’d bite into a Snickers Bar and be in zen peace. Wouldn’t that be funny?

PAUL: It was great at the beginning. I could speak the language almost fluently after a month and the people were fantastic. They’d come out and help us. Teach us songs. Man, we thought it was all going so well. But we got all the outhouses dug in six months and we had to stay there two years, that was the deal. And that’s when we began to realize that none of the Nglele were using these outhouses. We’d ask them why and they’d just shrug. So we started watching them very carefully and what we found out was the Nglele use their feces for fertilizer. It’s like gold to them. They thought we were all fucking crazy expecting them to waste their precious turds in our spiffy new outhouses. Turns out they’d been helping us because they misunderstood why we were there. They thought it was some kind of punishment and we’d be allowed to go home after we finished digging the latrines, that’s why they were helping us and then when we stayed on they figured we must be permanent outcasts or something and they just stopped talking to us altogether. Anyway, me and Jeff, the guy I told you about, we figured maybe we could salvage something from the fuckup so we got a doctor to make a list of all the medicines we’d need to start a kind of skeleton health program in Ngleleland and we ordered the medicine, pooled both our salaries for the two years to pay for it. Paid for it. Waited. Never came. So we went to the capital to trace it and found out this very funny thing. The Minister of Health had confiscated it at the dock, same man who got our team assigned to the Nglele Tribal Territories in the first place. We were furious, man, we stormed into his office and started yelling at him. Turned out to be a real nice guy. Educated in England, British accent and everything. Had this office lined with sets of Dickens and Thackeray all in leather bindings. Unbelievable. Anyway, he said he couldn’t help us about the medicine, he’d been acting on orders from higher up, which we knew was bullshit, then he said he really admired our enthusiasm and our desire to help his people but he wanted to know just out of curiosity, if we’d managed to start the medical program and save a thousand lives, let’s say, he wanted to know if we were prepared to feed and clothe those thousand people for the next ten years, twenty years, however long they lived. He made us feel so goddamned naive, so totally helpless and unprepared, powerless. We went out of there, got drunk, paid the first women we could find and spent the rest of the week fucking our brains out. And then for the next year and two months we just sat around in Ngleleland stoned out of our minds counting off the days we had left before we could go home. Anyway, since you asked, that’s what the Peace Corps was like.

Q. If you were president what wold you do? A. declare world peace, remove taxation on all people with income under 100K place qa 20% flat tax on all others with zero loopholes, forgive all student loans and make state colleges tuition free, repair the infrastructure and phase out all industries that contribute to pollution or climate change. Care for all animals and their habitats. Abolish money in politics remove gerrymandering and the electoral college. Remove all non-violent offenders from prisons to create an infra-structure job corps release program and things like that....

Ebert’s achievement in steering the Weimar Republic into being was undeniable. Yet he made many hasty compromises that were to return to haunt the Republic in different ways later on. His concern for a smooth transition from war to peace led him to collaborate closely with the army without demanding any changes in its fiercely monarchist and ultra-conservative officer corps, which he was certainly in a position to do in 1918-19. Yet Ebert’s willingness to compromise with the old order did not do anything to endear him to those who regretted its passing. Throughout the years of his Presidency, he was subjected to a remorseless campaign of vilification in the right-wing press.

I’m certain there were others among us who followed their hearts into education, the arts, and nonprofit work or who went off on Peace Corps missions or to serve in the military, but I knew very few of them.