Last night on NPR, in a news clip about former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver's death, the reporter referred to young Americans signing up for service in the Peace Corps as "idealistic."
Of course, many of us have known Peace Corps volunteers. They have tended to be ambitious -- not so much for themselves as for a team which is working to bring some degree of security, work, prosperity or even just reasonable health care to entire communities. They learn the languages, live rough (compared to most of us), fight the infections and frustrations and limitations the work brings them. "Idealistic"? You wouldn't survive for long in that work as an idealist. To serve in the Peace Corps, you need to be able to think for yourself, to be ambitious, rooted in reality, as well as adventurous and even entrepreneurial.
It's the Peace Corps volunteers who have tended to develop a wider range of muscles, not their college mates who stay behind and work within the corporate or academic structure. The muscle development for the stay-at-homes tends take the form of jogging, gyms, and using thigh-masters. The stay-at-homes' concerns are narrower, largely focused on themselves. Their lives revolve around their own families rather than whole communities.
The rut so many Americans find themselves in comes from a limited view of life sold to us by corporations. No matter what we work at, we spend much of our time and treasure on increasing the prosperity of that corporate world, a world that depends to a greater extent on containment and control than on peace and freedom. Within the corporate context, war makes more sense because it makes some sectors a lot more money than peace does and it opens up more markets for business. The language of the capitalist describes war in terms of ambition and adventure, associates it with the entrepreneurial and creative spirit ("nation building"). They sideline peace and idealism as signs of weakness. We send the peacemakers overseas, sometimes -- ironically -- to rebuild societies we've had a hand in destroying.
"Idealistic," "ambitious," "entrepreneurial," "adventurous" -- these words and how we use them tell us a lot about ourselves.
