I admit it's getting better

You'll be swell! You'll be great!
Gonna have the whole world on the plate!
Starting here, starting now,
honey, everything's coming up roses!
        -- Stephen Sondheim, 1959

Vista Volunteers were issued copies of the New York-phone-book sized “Catalog of Domestic Assistance Programs and given a lecture or two intended to sort out the many federal agencies and programs before being dispatched to the poorest communities in the nation.

In short, our challenge was to interpret the whole federal government to folks who were unaware of the many opportunities it provided.

The idea was that we “savvy” members of the American middle-class would be able to serve as liaisons between the poor and their government. This theory applied not only to our relationship with regular citizens, but with local government and non-profit organizations – including churches.

Building on the success of the Peace Corps, President Kennedy created the Volunteers in Service to America and put his pal Sargent Shriver (Maria’s dad) in charge of the whole shooting match,

That was more than 40 years ago. The program still exists as Vista/AmeriCorps, but has morphed several times in the interim and volunteers are handed a less ambitious (and far more pragmatic) set of goals.

By the end of my service, I had become much more realistic and was satisfied that while I did nothing spectacular or even long-lasting, I did serve as an interested and caring member of the middle class and sought to make friends and do what I could to give a few folks a small boost in one way or another.

I still feel rather foolish when I admit that in 1967 I considered myself fortunate to have been able to participate in the War on Poverty, that I sincerely believed that I would one day be able to tell my grandchildren that I participated in the final struggle that put an end not only to hunger and other economic deprivation, but also to prejudice and discrimination.

The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy occurred during my year of service and led to the loss of innocence for many of my generation. That golden era of optimism that had sprung into being in 1961 when the president announced that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” began to tarnish in 1968.

The dark ages that followed – also known as the Nixon years – led to disillusion and eventually, for many of my generation, to the abandoning of efforts to make the world a better place in favor of lining our own pockets. We became the “me” generation, people who came to believe that “greed is good.”

After having abandoned the field so many years ago, and after having developed a cynical attitude toward the notion that it ever was or ever can be possible to really put an end to poverty, illiteracy, disease, war and so on, I set out on my current adventure without any thought of rediscovering youthful optimism.

But in Oregon and Washington and then, much to my surprise, most particularly in Montana!, I discovered that many of my contemporaries didn’t give up the fight. And I learned that despite national leadership that was, to say the least, unfriendly to what they like to call “a culture of entitlement.”

I discovered that the old catalog of assistance programs has been replaced by local agencies – both governmental and non-profit – that are staffed, for the most part, by dedicated people who are committed to addressing inequities.

And, unlike many of us who attempted to serve without professional training, today’s army opposing poverty knows what it’s doing and is committed to much more than a single year of service.

More about my growing optimism regarding the domestic front as it grows. And stand by for a report from Montana that epitomizes the new landscape.