After you build latrines where most of the people live on less than $2.00 per day, you think differently -- no matter where you sit.
My best reading and thinking is often done on my bathroom throne.
On Thanksgiving Day evening, after Ciprofloxacin had stuffed away the diarrhea, I was back to my sanitary throne after weeks of a pioneering Habitat for Humanity Latrine Building Project in the overwhelming slums of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The filthy, hard work and wonderful people will remain etched in my memory. But, as often happens, those poignant experiences made me wonder about the bigger picture as, like so many Americans, I looked down from my seat of power.
For about 700 years, the Roman Empire dramatically influenced the world. After about 100 years, America’s influence is dramatically declining.
Although stigmatized by the avarice of imported slavery, we were largely a nation of the free blessed with an abundance of land, minerals, and resources. Americans hard work, learning, and barn building service to community and nation created a productive, learned, courageous working class. That working class then defeated the Fascists. Then they grew the world’s most envied middle class, which defeated the idea of communism.
By 1984, however, we had built a comfortable brave new world. We became increasingly fat and lazy, listening to the inexperienced media bobble-heads bluster that we were “Number 1,” while plying compliant, unquestioning brains with refereed coliseum games sold to us by corporatized networks via big screen televisions, tax payer subsidized coliseums, and video games.
The hard working, serving, worldly aware Greatest Generation melting pot is dying off. Memories of their even harder working parents tackling a frontier and building honest families led America’s Greatest Generation to beat down the greed that caused the depression, as well as defeat corporate fascism around the world.
Has America’s brave new world lost that “Greatness” backbone? Is “We are the 99!” searching for that seared-by-experience honest character?
War is a racketeer’s way of searing greatness into a nation. Marine General Smedley Butler knew it. Republican President Ike did too. War makes too much money for too few, while creating too many Gold Star Moms and troubled, wounded soldiers.
John Kennedy had a better idea for imprinting national greatness. He wanted the Peace Corps to grow to a million within a decade of its 1961 birth. (About 200,000 have served by 2011).
Imagine…
• If Kennedy had lived and tens of millions of Americans had served at home and abroad for the 18,000 days since JFK…
• How much more the world would know about handling its problems…
• How much richer America’s character and understanding would be…
• How terrorism would have sprouted no seeds.
There was no phony trickle down supply side economics in Kennedy’s grassroots economic development plan for the world’s 99%. Kennedy wanted to export tons of do-good Americans, not gobs of greenbacks, to areas of the world where they would need to learn to do the can-do basics of development, so that the world wouldn’t tilt toward the wastefulness of war.
It may be 50 years late, but People’s Lobby has drafted legislation that cost effectively uses existing NGOs (Nongovernmental Organizations) to field a peaceful, productive service corps of a million a year, and it could voluntarily nudge (although some say it nudges via public embarrassment) America’s richest 1% to make the AWSC (American World Service Corps) Congressional Proposal [www.WorldServiceCorps.us] function without a tax increase. It’s what World War II veteran JFK knew the world needed.
With half the world living on less than $2.00 per day, with a growing torrent of climate change driven stormy crises about to be unleashed upon the world, with dronish computerized games commanding more involvement and investment than Peace Corps and AmeriCorps, the once dominant seat of world power is failing to deliver on what the innocent children of the world sorely need…
After a day’s latrine work, an Ethiopian newscaster lamented, “90% of Addis Ababa lives on $2.00 a day.”
When you’re digging a 10’x10’x12’ deep latrine hole and lining it with cemented boulders while working in a typical 30’ x 30’ slum compound, where 4 to 10 people live in Eucalyptus branch framed and mud plastered shacks around which effluent, emanating from less skillfully done previous cesspools, flows everywhere during the rainy season; that newscaster’s lament carries weight and heart ache, especially when you, the soft Yank, think about living without a sanitary bathroom throne.
Today, Congressional candidates run for a largely dysfunctional Congress, where so many want to help those who already possess 27 marbled bathrooms and blame those without comfy saunas for being lazy. Today, because a couple generations of Americans failed to get involved enough through peaceful service with world needs, we have been easily hoodwinked into phony, economy busting wars. Now, we’re about to learn whether Citizens United campaign money will further dumb us down or smarten us up.
Will the seats of powers continue to concentrate in those luxurious marbled bathrooms?
Will enough Americans become involved enough in the maelstroms of problems lining up at home and abroad to demand and ELECT those who have tasted and understood those needs?
Will America’s power emanate from its Star War soldiers and hovering drones or from its t-shirted volunteers building homes and latrines?
As your Congressional candidates run, go to www.WorldServiceCorps.us, read the AWSC (American World Service Corps) Congressional Proposal. See if you don’t believe that the AWSC could be the army that helps handle the crises on the horizon and give America the opportunity to assume a clean and legitimate seat of power. Then publicly ask your candidates if they would support the AWSC if elected.
Let their answers determine your vote.
