“In our shrinking world all peoples of the world are neighbors. It is the responsibility of all of us to understand our neighbors and to learn from one another.”
Our Quote of the Week encapsulates a reality of our world that Sargent Shriver understood even back in 1962: that advances in transportation and technology have the potential to bring us all closer and closer together. If we realize that we are all neighbors, reasoned Shriver, it can only benefit us as a world community.
Sargent Shriver spoke these words in San Juan, Puerto Rico on October 11, 1962 while encouraging support for the Peace Corps, which had been launched less than two years earlier. In his speech, Shriver speaks of the variety of experiences shared by Volunteers. He emphasizes the importance of personal interaction—Volunteers meeting people in host nations as collaborators and fellow citizens. The willingness to meet as peers without the “usual diplomatic privileges” is what made the Peace Corps’ approach to foreign policy revolutionary at the time. The challenges met and overcome by Volunteers remind us that being a neighbor to a stranger is not always comfortable or easy. But it is a key ingredient to achieving peace, one community at a time.
In the speech, we discern the wonder that Shriver feels about the human ability to expand and explore, reaching even beyond the confines of our planet. In remarking on our ability to reach space, though, he says:
“As nations probe the infinite expanse of the universe, they must not neglect those expanses on earth which separate the strong from the weak and the rich from the poor.”
Our contemporary experience of our shrinking world shows that we have a lot more work to do to diminish the expanse between “strong and weak” or “rich and poor.” Our interactions can be colored by anxiety, polarization, animosity over competition, and obsession over borders. The feeling that the rest of the world is pressing in has led some of us to the believe that strength, freedom, and continuity of national identity can only be maintained by separating ourselves from the rest world and keeping others out. Sargent Shriver did not buy into this view. He knew that responding to the proverbial shrinking world by preoccupying ourselves with building walls would limit our ability to build harmony. He recognized the opportunity of seeing the world as a growing community and the safety that that sense of community could bring in times of need or peril.
We certainly have the human potential and the tools to come together as a world community. Let us imagine a world where we can treat each other as neighbors, and let us work together to make that world a reality.
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