3. Does an "arrogant" Peace Corps stand guilty of cultural imperialism? In earlier decades it was undoubtedly possible to charge the majority of Americans abroad with a comprehensive package of sins. Motives, behavior and impact were paternal or imperialist, materialist or presumptuous. But to claim today that one draft dodging friend represents 14,000 colonialists in the Peace Corps world may be politely described as wrong. The role of those Americans has changed--not to a point of perfection, certainly, but to a point where perfection is a less impossible goal.

Motives have changed. Said Cowan: "We joined the Peace Corps because we thought it would afford us a means of helping developing nations without imposing the United States' political and cultural values on them." Strange indeed, if "we" were the only ones.

Behavior has changed. The Peace Corps' effort in the last two years to improve language proficiency has been called the most significant force in linguistic development in the nation today. Still, for one whose Spanish still halts after a year in Latin America, sensitivity is indeed a distressing problem. The Peace Corps, spectacularly successful in some language programs, must still admit too many disappointments. In many countries, particularly in Africa, fluency in indigenous languages has for most Volunteers been total illusion. But very recent developments in language immersion do promise substantial progress from wish to reality in both exotic and romance languages.

In the last year, the Peace Corps significantly increased participation of host countries in training plans and programs, rapidly increased the number of training programs in host countries. Ecuadorian staff members have designed and supervised U.S. training of several groups of non-urban Volunteers. A group of teachers trained entirely in Ghana last summer. The increased relevance of in-country training is marked; the reduction of skepticism and distrust by nationals is substantial. This year, perhaps half of all Volunteers will be at least partly trained in-country; in 1969, the great majority. The Peace Corps has now largely gained the insights and the technical tools, such as language and training, to split the historic syndrome of the American abroad; to identify his useful and constructive elements, to reject the insensitive and the arrogant. That is has taken the best of seven years to do so is a poor argument for a return to imperialism or to isolation.

And impact has changed. The President of Niger, Hamani Diori, thus described his Peace Corps Volunteers four months ago: "When one is 22 to 25 years old with his future before him and accepts to come work in the difficult conditions of Niger...for such young men and women one can have only admiration and consideration, and esteem. I believe that the founders of the Peace Corps promoted this...idea as a means to rediscover universal brotherhood, brotherhood among people. It is this rediscovery of man, of this brotherhood of human dignity that I say, Long live the Peace Corps."

Such conviction in the sensitivity of the Peace Corps does not embrace every citizen of the country, nor each country, perhaps, in which the Peace Corps serves. But conviction balances doubts and demands not rejection but improvement. The complexity of development does not diminish its urgency, unless the riots of New Haven and Detroit suggest that progressive majors are now superfluous manpower.

The Peace Corps' Fifth Annual Report describes the beginning of the Peace Corps program in Niger: "The language problems, programming problems and the inhospitable climate (which seemed to preclude any dramatic developmental studies) plus a high turnover of Peace Corps staff ...threatened to turn this...project into a near shambles. At the end of the first year there was serious talk of 'pulling out.' Where, if so, would have been 'the rediscovery of universal brotherhood.'"

4. Is Peace Corps indistinguishable from the U.S. Government? Can the U.S. honestly be working for peace in some countries while dropping napalm on another country? If peace is the product of understanding, respect, and economic development, the need to work for peace is real in several score of countries whether or not there is peace in Vietnam. The imperative may indeed be greater as there is so much misunderstood and remaining to be said about Vietnam.

Is it immoral to join the Peace Corps if one opposes the Vietnam war? The Peace Corps is funded by the Congress because it is to the American people without doubt the most popular from of foreign involvement. To reject the Peace Corps on the grounds of the war is to restrict the American experience to war, not to strengthen the belief in peace; to obstruct progress in public opinion far more than to obstruct the war.

Is the Peace Corps a tool of foreign policy? Not the foreign policy of this country but the domestic policy of 57 nations. Do we speak the official line? Says Dean Rusk, "The Peace Corps cannot be used as an instrument of foreign policy, for to do so would be to destroy its contribution to our foreign policy."

Can Volunteers express their beliefs in domestic media about contemporary issues? Yes, witness Vietnam, Will the Peace Corps become a homogeneous group? Only if the heterogeneous abdicate in favor of the puritan vacuum of abstention.

Does the Peace Corps have a bureaucracy? Yes, as does any program large enough to be significant.

Is the bureaucracy closed? Ask twenty Ecuadorian PCV's if anyone listened to their recommendations; ask Paul Cowan if the former Peace Corps view on the expression of opinion on public issues was modified as a result of articulate Volunteer ideas; ask nine former Volunteers who now direct country programs if, like some lower form of life, they are unable to learn from their experience.

If there were a promise path to peace, our predecessors would have walked it sprightly, many years ago. Will now a generation participate individually, collectively, doggedly, creatively, not merely in the doing, but in the discovery of how to do? Will they not only walk the road toward peace, but with fifty or one-hundred nations together find the road: through misunderstanding and economic backwardness, imperfect agencies abroad and imperfect agencies at home? Precisely because the path is cloudy, not merely with Vietnam but with major violence in 55 nations of the world since World War II, 15,000 Volunteers and staff now welcome this responsibility. The Year 2000 will ask their generation, the rest of several million, Did They Join