What You Can Do for Your Country by Patrick Henry
It’s time for a new generation of Americans to create a new Peace Corps for the 21st century.
Near the end of his inaugural address, on January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy concluded: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Those words meant something to me. I was 20 years old at the time, walking guard duty near the DMZ in Korea, eight years after the fighting had stopped there.
At the height of the Cold War, Kennedy was insisting that he represented a new generation of Americans that would work for global solidarity against tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself. Less than two months later, on March 1, 1961, he signed Executive Order 10924, thereby creating the Peace Corps, whose goals were to help underdeveloped countries, to promote global understanding, and to build world peace.
Today, 65 years later, it’s time for a new generation of Americans to create a new Peace Corps for the 21st century. Here are five things that our new group can do for our country:
I. Trash “America First”: Let’s stop thinking only about our own country as if we lived in a vacuum, as if everything is okay in the world as long as the price of gas remains under $4 dollars a gallon. The “America First” mentality is based on greed, oil, and disregard for the fate of others. In its place, let’s rejoin the treaties we dropped out of, where countries create communal bonds and work together to solve the world’s problems. Let’s once again become reliable partners who work through dialogue and diplomacy, not pronouncements, executive orders, and threats.
II. Slash the Military Budget: Quite simply, the proposed military budget of $1.5 trillion for 2027, the largest in history, is nothing short of obscene in any case—but particularly in our case, given the homelessness, food insecurity, and healthcare problems in our country. Let’s never forget Martin Luther King Jr.’s words: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
III. End Our Endless and Senseless Wars: A recent Brown University report reveals horrific data: U.S. military operations since 9/11 have killed more than 940,000 people in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Pakistan, and that “as a result of those wars’ destruction of economics, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment, an estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million people.” This does not include the 72,000 casualties in Gaza or the several thousand in Iran. All this carnage and destruction, for what? It should be obvious to everyone that violence only breeds more violence and unending cycles of revenge. The last two popes, Francis and Leo, have maintained that there is no longer such a thing as a “just war.” What could be more sobering than the fact that, since 1990, 90 percent of the victims of all wars have been civilians? We need to abolish the newly formed Department of War and create a cabinet-level Department of Peace that would prioritize nonviolent conflict resolution, violence prevention, and peacebuilding both at home and abroad.
IV. Welcome Immigrants: The fact that masked employees of the federal government are randomly rounding up and deporting people in our streets based on the color of their skin is beyond outrageous. Let’s be merciful neighbors and show compassion to all people who have been here for years, working hard, and paying taxes. My father came to this country in 1914; yes,112 years ago. He came at the age of 17 with only five years of school from a starving family with 12 children. He spent two years working in a bar in Manhattan, paying back the man who paid his way over to America. Then he served in the Navy during World War I and then as a New York City policeman for 41 years. Does his story sound familiar? It should. It’s the story of just about every Mexican American family I know in my hometown of Walla Walla, Washington: arrive with little education, take menial jobs, give your children opportunities you never had. We are a country of immigrants; that is our strength. Make no bones about it: the current administration’s treatment of immigrants as well as its persistent campaign to do away with birthright citizenship is driven by pure racism. We must use nonviolent means to resist these efforts. The danger here is not civil disobedience but rather civil obedience.
V. Abolish Nuclear Weapons: Last year, the nine nuclear nations spent $119 billion on their nuclear arsenals. Once again, by spending $69 billion, the United States outspent the other eight nuclear nations combined. Not only is this an egregious waste of money, but the existence of nuclear weapons represents the greatest threat to our survival as a species and the greatest threat to the planet itself. Even so, today there are no nuclear weapons limitation treaties nor treaties for monitoring nuclear development, and most nuclear powers are modernizing and expanding their nuclear arsenals. We must convince our leaders to bring us back from the brink of disaster and join the 122 nations who have signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which bans “developing, testing, producing, acquiring, possessing, stockpiling, using, or threatening to use nuclear weapons.” ♦
Patrick Henry served in the US Army from 1960 to 1962. He taught French literature and French language at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, for 30 years. Now, he teaches in the Quest Program at Walla Walla Community College. His last three books have been Holocaust related.