It is a privilege to be here tonight to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Operation Crossroads Africa.
I join all of you in paying tribute to your leader, Jim Robinson. The best way to honor his achievements is to continue working for his goals.
I first met Jim Robinson seven years ago when he was on the Peace Corps Advisory Committee. We needed him then for many practical reasons -- there were few men who knew as much about the needs of Africa or the desires of its people. There were few men who were so thoroughly trusted and respected by all the ways of African life. There were few men who were so expert in building bridges of communication -- and getting all manner of traffic to use those bridges.
Jim Robinson was able to help get Peace Corps started because he had dreams that needed telling and ideas that needed living. He realized that the Peace Corps could become what Crossroads already was -- an experiment in people.
Just as in Crossroads, he knew that Peace Corps would be successful for one reason -- the volunteers would serve because they wanted to, not because they were required to.
And that is what happened at Crossroads--and continues to happen at Peace Corps.
The volunteers are not drafted and they are not paid.
They don’t work for a pension and they get no overtime.
They don’t go overseas to sell America and they don’t go overseas to fight Communism.
In an age that is both the best and worst of times, they realize you cannot change men -- you can only serve them. As Plato wrote: “You cannot make people good; the most you can do is create the conditions in which the good life can be lived.”
The efforts to create these conditions is what Crossroads Africa is all about. It is what the Peace Corps is all about. And -- at home -- it is what the War on Poverty is all about.
But how will these conditions be brought about. How can we create a world where every man has what he needs -- and is free to desire what he wants.
One answer is that we use our social inventions.
As with all new ways of doing old things, a social invention is a refusal to bow down before fate. It is an enlargement of what we know in the face of what we hope for.
Until now, human life has mostly progressed by means of mechanical inventions -- new methods of using steam or electricity or fire. But in our era, human life is making progress because of our social inventions -- Crossroads Africa, Peace Corps, Montessori schools, Head Start, The Teacher Corps, Upward Bound, Foster Grandparents.
Instead of steam, electricity or fire we are using the kinetic energy of other forces --imagination, initiative, willpower.
Instead of inventing ways to make things work, we are inventing ways to make things better.
In the past few years, I have seen how these social inventions work.
No one two years ago could have brought to this banquet tonight a painting that I have standing on those two chairs to the left of this table. No one could have brought that painting before this audience and told you that it was made by a 21-year-old boy from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
That boy’s name is Saul Haymond. He has 12 brothers and sisters. Two years ago, Saul dropped out of school. He was reading at a second grade level and doing arithmetic at the third grade level. He could add two and two but he couldn’t multiply two times two. He could subtract three from six, but he couldn’t divide three into six. He was 20 pounds underweight. His teeth were pocked with cavities and they hurt from abscesses. His clothes didn’t fit very well. He spoke slowly. He stayed home most of the time. He had no job, no education, no hope, no nothing.
Now the tragic thing is that there are a million-and-a-half young men and women like Saul Haymond in the United States. But Saul Haymond from Baton Rouge, Louisiana was one of the lucky ones. He walked down the street one day and saw a poster about Job Corps. It looked good and he decided to join.
Today, Saul Haymond is 20 pounds heavier than he was 18 months ago. He had to have five teeth pulled and six cavities filled. He’s got a new suit and it fits him. He’s moved from the second grade in reading to the 8th grade in one year. He’s gone from third grade in arithmetic through 7th grade. He was elected president of his dormitory by his fellow students. He has been selected by his teachers as the foreman of his workshop -- where signs and posters of the United States Parks are designed. He tutors and advises new youngsters when they come to the Job Corps. He’s been offered two jobs -- one at $2.50 and one at $2.80 an hour.
The painting I brought tonight is something he did in his spare time. I happened to bump into Saul in the 0E0 lobby and he said he was going to take one of those two jobs. And when he does, he’s going off the welfare rolls of Louisiana. He’s going off the taxpayer’s back. He’s going off the list of unemployed. He’s going to go from a liability to an asset for his family, for his state, his country and his fellow man.
Anyone running a federal program could come here and give you an individual success story. But Saul Haymond’s story is not an individual, isolated, unique case. Job Corps has done for 48,000 youngsters -- boys and girls -- what they’ve done for,Saul Haymond.
There are other social inventions also.
I think everyone who has been associated with Operations Crossroads Africa will be interested to know of a new dimension of volunteerism in this country. For the past seven years -- through the Peace Corps and Crossroads Africa -- thousands of Americans have gone to Africa to serve as volunteers.
One of the most exciting things, however, is that Africans are now coming to this country and volunteering their time and talents through the VISTA program.
For example, last year a young African named Joe Jolongo from the Cameroons, and who is studying at Brandeis University, served as a VISTA associate in the hollows of Appalachia. And this year, we hope to enlist as VISTA associates 100 foreign students from all over the world who are studying in this country. A large number of them will be Africans. They will join forces with the VISTA Volunteers to serve in some of the most impoverished communities in our country.
Two years ago when VISTA was launched, it was a social invention that many people predicted would never work. Nobody wants to volunteer, it was said, for service in urban ghettoes, migrant camps or the isolated Indian reservations of this country. If someone wanted to volunteer, he would be interested in the Peace Corps -- foreign travel, new sights, another culture.
Well, they were wrong. In two years, more than 180,000 people have written to VISTA. Nearly 100,000 have filled out forms applying to serve. And more than 6,000 have already entered VISTA service. By June of this year, nearly 10,000 Americans will have made their own personal commitment here at home through serving the poor as VISTA volunteers.
As a matter of ironic fact, VISTA now has to turn away many well-qualified candidates --because the number of people applying far outstrips the number of positions available within the current budget. But VISTA has started a new Citizens Corps of part time volunteers -- where people can serve in their own communities.
Already 15,000 people -- high school and college students, housewives and retired men and women -- are volunteering their services part time and on a regular basis to the poor of their communities.
It seems as if the old ways of service are evolving into newer methods.
Nikos Kazantzakis saw the situation in Report to Greco:
We have been born in an important age of kaleidoscopic experiments, adventures and clashes, not only between the virtues and vices, as formerly, but rather...between virtues themselves. The old, recognized virtues have begun to lose their authority; they are no longer able to fulfill the religious, moral, intellectual and social demands of the contemporary soul. Man’s soul seems to have grown bigger; it cannot fit any longer within the old molds.
What does all this mean? What is happening?
Is the fad-value of idealism suddenly the latest thing to be “in?”
Are we on a brotherhood kick?
The answer to these questions is no.
Something else is happening. All of these social inventions have helped create a new kind of humanism in America.
We are beginning to understand what poverty means in America.
Last week, the Senate Subcommittee investigating the anti-poverty program was in Mississippi. Many people testifying said they had no food. They said they were hungry. They said their children were hungry.
The next day the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a front-page story. It said the senators were surprised by the hunger. Senator Murphy was so overcome that he said an appeal should be made immediately to the President. Mississippi should be put into a state of emergency.
Then the Senator from California was quoted as saying: “I didn’t know we were going to deal with starving people and starving children.”
My reply is: thank God Senator Murphy finally saw some poverty. He finally knows that to be poor means you have no money. He finally knows that poor people have empty stomachs and hopeless hearts.
For two and a half years I’ve been going before Congress saying that’s what poverty is all about.
Two weeks ago, it was the subject of Pope Paul’s encyclical. He urged an “effort to bring about a world that is more human toward all men, where all will be able to give and receive, without one group making progress at the expense of the other.”
This is the kind of humanism that no longer says to the poor man: “Can’t you make it the hard way, like I did?” Instead, we realize why the poor man can’t make it the hard way -- because technology has changed it into the impossible way. In the age of automation, it is three or four times more difficult to rise out of poverty as in immigrant times -- because a poor man has to get three or four times more training to find a job.
We have a new kind of humanism that understands the most important reality of our day -- the way to stop war is not to condemn the soldier, but to fight the conditions that make war possible -- poverty, disease, injustice.
But often this humanism has difficulty finding practitioners. It almost seems as if we are living in a value vacuum.
How can we pretend to tell the countries of Africa what to do about the problem of hunger -- when farmers in Wisconsin pour milk on the ground rather than offer it to the starving people of Mississippi?
I read recently that Americans spend 12 times more annually for liquor and four times more for tobacco than is spent for the War on Poverty.
I think there is something wrong with this country when the amount expended per annum for television commercials is greater than the entire amount spent so far on the Peace Corps and the War on Poverty.
What is needed is more social inventions and fewer social diversions.
In a world where millions of people live with no hope and millions more die because of no bread -- in a world where a dog in America often eats better than a human being in Ghana -- in that kind of world, the blood-stained face of reality is asking each of us to pay up personally.
The problem -- especially with our young people, the kind who join Crossroads Africa -- is not dissatisfaction or dissent. Rather, the question is how to use that dissatisfaction creatively.
Despite the refugees from conformity who are given to negativism, there are still countless young Americans who are using their dissatisfaction creatively.
They are dissatisfied with the towns in Appalachia with no sewers. So they join VISTA and go down there to help build sewers.
They are protesting the primitive way of life of the American Indian. So they go to the reservations and teach in Head Start classes.
They are protesting the slums in East St. Louis. So they go there and work in a Neighborhood Youth Corps.
This is the kind of dissatisfaction that only courage can create and history can honor.
These Americans fit the description John F. Kennedy gave himself after two years in the Presidency: “an idealist without illusions.”
They have no illusions about the cost for a better world nor the price they must pay for it.
Instead of telling everyone what’s wrong with a world they didn’t make, they are helping to do what’s right in a world they can make.
What is the reward for this kind of humanism? To quote Ernest Hemingway, “You don’t really own anything until you can give it away.”
That is what many young Americans are learning -- that you don’t really own your life until you give it to others.
But before we decide to give, one thought must be considered. It was raised recently by the Jesuit poet, Daniel Berrigan.
We stand there -- American, white, Christian, with the keys of the kingdom and the keys of the world in our pocket. Everything about us says: Be like me! I’ve got it made. But the poor man sees the emperor -- naked. Like the look of Christ, the poor man strips us down to the bone...
The poor have it hard, the saying goes. Well, we’re the hardest thing they have.
