Veterans of the Peace Corps understand that.
The original idea of the Peace Corps, as President John Kennedy imagined it, was that American volunteers would spread goodwill around the world. It might be subtle, but they would change hearts and minds of the people in the countries where they volunteered.
It worked.
But the hearts and minds that got changed were those of the volunteers. It was their perspective that broadened. The countries they visited weren't just pawns in a Cold War chess match. They were unique and worthy places in themselves, and their leaders deserve respect.
Jack Mullen is a Peace Corp veteran from both Central America and Africa. He writes that President Trump's Oval Office meetings with the presidents of Ukraine and South Africa were intentional insults to them. Jack Mullen spent his youth in Medford. As summer jobs in our teens, Jack and I picked and thinned pear trees in local orchards. He lives in Washington, D.C.
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| Jack on the left. His parents, also Peace Corps volunteers, on the right |
Guest Post by Jack Mullen
Dignity in the Oval Office takes another hit.
President Donald Trump's and Vice President JD Vance's of the United States planned Oval Office ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took a back seat to last week’s orchestrated humiliation of President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa.
White House advisors conjured up the perfect setting to humiliate Ramaphosa. Invitees, the press, and White South African celebrities were all welcomed inside an intimate White House setting to watch Donald Trump narrate selected videos of how the White race, especially White farmers, suffer in South Africa.
The first video allowed President Trump to declare: “This is very bad ---these are burial sites right here, on both sides of the road, these are all White farmers.” The problem was the video was not of graves, but of crosses in a symbolic protest five years ago that Trump supporters dug up from X.
President Ramaphosa inquired where this had happened because he had never it seen it.
The sandbagging continued when an old film from X showed an opposition South African politician yelling “Kill the Boer! Kill the Boer!” In a democratic country like South Africa, free speech can at times be vile. Same in the United States when a Trump-inspired mob in front of the U.S. Capitol shouted “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!”
Fair game would have been had President Ramaphosa turned turn the room’s attention to a video of the January 6 assault on the Capitol.
I thought Ramaphosa cut Trump down in a fairly dignified and idealistic manner when he explained that the democratic government of South Africa has three equal branches of government and that his secretary of agriculture is a White South African from an opposition party. This seems to me as the democratic model that past Republican and Democratic administrations had displayed to the world.
And what was Trump’s reaction to Ramaphosa’s explanation of how South African democracy works? The head of the world’s longest running democracy looked bored. If he weren’t about to fall asleep, he might have declared “Enough” and walked out of the room.
Which is worse, the president and vice president of the United States berating the leader of Ukraine for not being thankful to be allowed into the Oval Office, or the look of complete boredom when the leader of an African country explains how his country’s democracy functions?
As an American and former Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, I put my head between my hands and was embarrassed to the point of sadness to witness such a spectacle inside our White House.
South Africa’s president presented himself in the Oval Office as well as he could. He came across as everything Mr. Trump and his invited guests were not.
There is hope! From observations in my short time in Africa, and contrary to Trump’s account in front of Ramaphosa, Europe’s combined foreign aid was more than the United State's aid in 2024. My money is on the rest of the world stepping up to cover the slippage of American efforts to assist our friends in Africa for the next three-plus years.
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3 comments:
The Peace Corps was a reflection of when America cared about others, but not anymore.
For over three decades I’ve had the privilege of traveling and working in 10 different countries in Africa- mostly volunteering for humanitarian organizations. My American passport almost always meant easy and trouble-free passage and cooperation (to the extent anyone would receive it). We Americans were generally regarded in a positive light, except in more strict fundamentalist areas.
I don’t need to wonder how I would be received these days. The contempt this administration has for the less fortunate is shameful. The fact that he was elected by such a large percentage of voters reflects on all of us.
We are not perfect of course, but more than half a century of international good will has been shattered in mere months.
President Zelensky never had a chance. Trump is a great admirer of Putin’s style and is indebted to him for his election interference. President Ramaphosa didn't have a chance either. Trump is a blatant racist, pandering to his “Jews will not replace us” base by deporting people of color and importing whites.
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