Peter (Of Peter, Paul & Mary) Gives His Support For MorePeaceCorps

[Thanks to great Peace Corps Veteran Geri Critchley, and thanks to Peter Yarrow, we have Peter’s recent letter to Rep. Nita Lowey in support of MorePeace Corps.]

Dearest Rep. Nita Lowey,

This is a personal message to you from your buddy, your long time  supporter and your friend, Puff’s “real” daddy.

In the vote coming up  next week on Peace Corps funding, we have a SERIOUSLY IMPORTANT  opportunity to send a message to our nation, and nations beyond, that could greatly help  to rejuvenate the spirit of humanity, morality and generosity in America, so  absent from our policies, our funding and our actions, during the Bush years.

We cannot lose this special opportunity,  and I’m relying on you, as one of my favorite and most respected members of  the House, to “hang in there” for doing the right thing, as you have in the  past.

Though I fully expect that you’ll be voting for doubling the funding for the Peace Corps when the vote comes up next week, if you are having any doubts, let me tell you why, in my opinion, this particular vote is both crucial and precedential.  

I believe that, perhaps more than anything else we do as a nation, the  Peace Corps, as a person-to-person expression of America’s decency and basic humanity, sends our most powerful message to its citizenry and to other countries around the world.

Whatever programs that lose their priority due to  the current fiscal downturn/crisis, the Peace Corps and related service programs, as well as the education of our children and the providing of crucial services for our special needs population must, simply must, be prioritized and fully funded.

We need to celebrate and support the  Peace Corps to demonstrate to ourselves and others that we are, once  again, without question, a caring nation with decent, caring priorities and  policies. We need to win this vote to heal our hearts, so injured and so wearied during the Bush years when we saw respect for our country eroding  terribly, internally and world-wide.  We need this vote for doubling the   Peace Corps funding in order to demonstrate that our legislature is are  willing to walk-the-walk and stand up for what’s right, for hope, and for a  return to the spirit of our nation as articulated in the brilliance of the Peace Corps founders Sarge Shriver, President John F. Kennedy,  Senator Harris Wofford, and others.

My prediction:

If we win this  vote, we will establish a crucial precedent for our nation to “do the right  thing”.
Please, if you have any doubt, prioritize this vote to fully double the funding for the Peace Corps next week, knowing that victory on this one vote will affect all forthcoming votes on where the heart of America now  stands. The bell tolls for you, me, for us all.

Lose this vote, and we will show ourselves, our elected leaders, to be less than courageous, less that doggedly moral, and we will thereby lose precious  momentum for restoring equity, humanity and social justice to our land.  

Please be courageous. We, so many of us, are with you.

With greatest  respect and huge thanks to you for your moral leadership now, in the past, and  in the bright, though challenging future, we  face.

Peter