Strange things can pass before your eyes as you exit the Capital YWCA, on the bleakest of blocks in the capital.
It was 1 p.m. on a Saturday and there, in an area favored by the homeless and the deranged, were two people, toe to toe, in a vigorous argument. One was black and homeless, the other was white and clearly well-heeled and as dignified as a character out of Henry James.
“It’s all you white folk!” said the homeless fellow, alluding to the supposed cause of virtually all the planet’s ills.
“What you need is a job and there are lots of jobs. Heck, you can go down right now and apply at the Job Corps,” replied the older gentleman, who had just exited from Catholic mass nearby.
The only other person on the entire block, namely me, started laughing. Only in America: a homeless guy going at it with R. Sargent Shriver, 83, brother-in-law of President John F. Kennedy, former vice presidential candidate and head of the family-inspired Special Olympics.
Ever the mild-mannered referee, I informed the jobless gent that the other fellow was one of the last people in town with whom he should pick a fight. His credentials, at least when it comes to doing right for citizens of scarcity, are unassailable.
Of course, I could have mentioned the institution with which Shriver is closely associated, the Peace Corps. Shriver was the first director, serving at the behest of his brother-in-law, and has subsequently seen its cadre of overseas volunteers rise to 16,000, then drop to one-third of that number by the start of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
It’s back on the rise, in no small measure due to Mark Gearan, its director and Clinton’s first communications director, a Massachusetts-bred attorney and political operative who resembles, and has performed like, an adroit small-town banker.
Despite Republican qualms not long ago, he has shepherded budget increases and a workforce that, if the Senate follows the House’s approval of a proposed budget, will be back to the 10,000 mark by 2003.
For sure, there has been cost-cutting (in part to please the GOP) and vigorous internal debates about the Peace Corps’ future, including whether it should focus on sending business types to emerging economies or generalists more interested in assisting the truly downtrodden.
But it has been an adroit survivor and this autumn will have more volunteers, 7,400, than it has in 25 years–all this with the approval of the same isolationist Republicans who are stiffing the United Nations when it comes to paying our huge dues debt of $1.7 billion.
One thus assumes that some of these same skinflint legislators might be aghast to learn what Christine Lonergan of Naperville is doing.
Lonergan, 24, is actually helping the Chinese!
Yes, the government that may have been committing espionage at our Los Alamos, N.M., nuclear laboratory, and perhaps proving the FBI incompetent in the process, is at least tangentially benefiting from a small, 44-volunteer Peace Corps education project in Sichuan province.
“Well, they do represent one-sixth of the world’s population, and I can’t see how you wouldn’t make an effort,” said Lonergan, a University of Illinois graduate. “We don’t have to be the best of friends diplomatically, but it’s definitely a relationship worth investing in.”
Lonergan, the daughter of a nurse and a corporate regional manager, majored in English but didn’t want to go to graduate school. The U. of I. just happens to have a permanent Peace Corps recruiter, and meeting her prompted Lonergan to consider “experiencing a totally different culture, maybe Africa or somewhere else.”
She had done some volunteering in college, tutoring elementary students after school and working concessions at college football games. So she applied and was accepted by the Peace Corps and placed in their education program, meaning they wanted her to be a teacher. Her first preference was to go to the Caribbean. She wound up in China.
Upon arrival, she had nine weeks of fairly intensive Chinese language training and instruction in teaching English as a second language. As fate would have it, she arrived in Beijing last fall and, that very day, President Clinton was there. Her group was invited to the U.S. Embassy and she heard him speak.
A few days later she went to her posting, about a 2 1/2-hour plane ride from Beijing, in a city of 600,000 located in a generally rural area. Her job would be to teach teachers, namely college students who planned to become junior high instructors.
Many of the Chinese students have had from six to eight years of English already and their grammar skills are excellent (“better than mine”) but have had little experience actually speaking or listening to English. “Their listening and speaking skills aren’t really there.”
She teaches about 12 hours a week, lives in a dorm, travels by bus and doesn’t do much with her free time other than watch American movies with her Chinese friends (“When Harry Met Sally” was the most recent fare) and sends lots of e-mail on weekends from a new computer at the local post office.
“The phone connection is better there and they charge about $1 an hour,” she explained.
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“This has been chock full of experiences I would not have anticipated,” said Lonergan. “Watching `Saving Private Ryan’ in Chinese or having a conversation about the role of the U.S. in World War II with a Chinese friend who did not realize the U.S. had fought in World War II.”
Now back in the U.S. for a short visit, she has inevitably been confronted by the latest stories on alleged Chinese espionage. Rather than dissuade her about what she’s doing, “it re-emphasizes how important it is to have volunteers offering positive American images for the Chinese,” especially among the many Chinese whom she finds believing that Americans are all rich, drive fancy cars, carry guns and do drugs.
They also couldn’t believe the American obsession with the Monica Lewinsky mess, surprised “that America would let something happen to let him (Clinton) lose such face. Most Chinese sympathized with him. They couldn’t believe the American media would do that to their leader.”
During last December’s bombing of Iraq, most people she knows heeded the official Chinese government line, seeing the U.S. as an aggressor. About Kosovo, they’re not quite sure what to think, unsure if war in the Balkans is a big deal.
Gearan, her boss, obviously believes the Peace Corps in China, and elsewhere, is a big deal and quickly notes a history of laboring in countries with whom our diplomatic relations are poor and in lands run by outright dictators. “Ours is a people-to-people program,” he reiterated Friday.
“Obviously, Christine is doing traditional Peace Corps work. But she’s doing it in a non-traditional country,” Gearan said. “If JFK was told it would be in China or the former Soviet republics,” he would have done a double take.
Then, again, JFK might have done a double take if he spied Shriver, 83, his brother-in-law, reading the riot act to an obstreperous homeless fellow on a desolate Washington street.
Another look at school violence
Now that there’s a lull in those cable news “town hall meetings” over the Littleton, Colo., tragedy, a few facts on school violence:
– Since 1993, the overall crime rate in schools for students ages 12 to 18 has declined, according to Department of Education figures. The rate of allegedly intentional injuries inflicted by a weapon hasn’t gone up in 20 years.
– Overall, the school crime rate has gone down a tad since 1993, with 164 school-related crimes for every 1,000 students ages 12 to 18.
– Serious violent crime is a rarity. Less than 1 percent of the more than 7,000 kids murdered in 1992 and 1993 (the latest figures available) were killed at school. Initial data for the last two years indicates that violent school deaths are declining.
– The percentage of students found carrying a deadly weapon has also been on the decline.
And, yet, curiously, as the department itself concedes, “While the school crime rate is decreasing, students feel less safe at school.”
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.