Peace Corps volunteers in some troubled spots
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Because
so many opinion molders and leaders lacked vision and real world experience,
Afghanistan did not receive school-rebuilding congressional money.
Today
those 14-year-olds are about 40. How
many do you think carry guns and bombs for a "dangerous" or maybe even "crazy" side? How many were radicalized because we lacked the vision to spread education and understanding?
When you continue dumb, vision-less public policies long enough, are expensive wars your blow back?
When George W. Bush led us into a trumped-up war in the wrong country, it pushed teetering radicals into rabid crazies. Our "Drone them!" response to dispatch these crazies to the next life's Virgin Lands should lead thinking Americans to realize -- rabid droning produces innumerable inexpensive, stealth human droners who walk bombs and terror everywhere.
As Ibrahim
Mothana, late Yemeni activist, writer, and co-founder of Yemen's Al-Watan
political party, said in his June 13, 2012, op-ed "How Drones Help Al
Qaeda" at nytimes.com:
"Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology but rather by a sense of revenge and despair... Anti-Americanism is far less prevalent in Yemen than in Pakistan. But rather than winning the hearts and minds of Yemeni civilians, America is alienating them by killing their relatives and friends. Indeed, the drone program is leading to the Talibanization of vast tribal areas and the radicalization of people who could otherwise be America's allies in the fight against terrorism in Yemen..."
Today's Roman Empire is making too many stealth enemies. Kennedy gave us the chance to solidify friendships everywhere with the robust Peace Corps he dreamed of, but we didn't build it. We preferred squeezing its budget and ignoring its overwhelming benefits.
The
America's
World Service Corps (AWSC) Congressional Proposal gives
us the chance to build the big Peace Corps and other do-good organizations (AmeriCorps,
Habitat for Humanity, Doctors without Borders, etc.) under the AWSC umbrella.
Peace Corps & Afghanistan under Shriver
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Let's not miss another generation or two before we build the one-million-strong national service corps that the AWSC proposal calls for and the likes of General Stanley McChrystal are echoing. Shedding our responsibility to build a needed robust service corps only shreds treasure and our soldiers' blood in the future.
If man unbuilded goes.
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