Reunion; Not

We were going to celebrate, after almost a half a century, the founding of the Peace Corps and the enduring effects of our service in it on our lives ever since. Former volunteers and staff people living now in the DC area offered their homes to the veterans of the earliest Nigeria groups (and, no doubt, the other original volunteer groups of 1961) for discussions and parties and general rejoicing and reminiscing and bringing-up-to-date, aside from the formal events planned by the Peace Corps for its founding members. We had all written resumes of our lives since the early sixties for distribution to our group, and excited e-mails were flying thick and fast.

Then someone's ruthless hatred slammed two significant buildings and a small town's worth of people out of existence in a short, hard series of flaming impacts. Silence from the organizers of our reunion, lost in the vaster silence of a shocked and horrified populace.

When I could think again at all, I sat in my home and thought about the risks of traveling to and from DC right now, the meaning of the things we had meant to discuss (social justice, economic assistance and exploitation, culture-conflict), what I would miss if I didn't go, and how I would feel about that if even a postponed reunion proved impossible because of later developments.

Wasn't this precisely the right moment to get together in Washington anyway to publicly reaffirm our commitment to mutual understanding and peaceful resolution of conflict, in the face both of the unknown enemy's attack and chest-thumping threats from a compromised government at home?

Make no mistake: I see no excuse in this or any world for the savagery of the plane-bomb attacks. But I do see reasons for that savagery to exist, and to persist beyond the immediate situation. Because of this, I don't think a lot of blustering and the threatening maneuvers of warships and troops, let alone some form of bombing, can possibly deliver what we need. That is, the carefully measured and surgically accurate response required for a successful start on immobilizing the killers, followed by an informed and serious effort to address the factors that created such killers in the first place so that more just like them don't simply step in to take their place.

I don't pretend to know how to do any of this -- although I do like the suggestion I've seen circulated, to "bomb" the abused and starving Afghani populace with more food stores and soap and good clean drinking water than the Taliban can confiscate, in the interests of strengthening the people's will and capacity to join the rebels and kick these criminal bullies out themselves. All I can say is, Heaven -- any Heaven you care to believe in -- help the people in charge of figuring out an effective plan of action that will do more good than evil in the world.

At any rate, I hemmed and I hawed and I wavered and I wondered about going to DC in spite of the horrible change in circumstances there and in New York: was I a coward, dithering because of a newly enhanced fear of flying, a terror of being buried alive in the rubble of a follow-up attack on DC (well, yeah)? Or just sensible (that too)?

Then the word came from the organizers: the reunion is postponed, in part because the security perimeter around the White House and other major government buildings has been extended to take in the convention hotel and the meeting spaces. Nobody would be able to move around in there without rigorous and repeated checking and scrutiny. That would certainly constrain the easy, joyous ebb and flow of friends and events that had been envisioned. So, like so many conventions and meetings and events, our little gathering fell victim to the terror of the times.

For the time being, anyway, our general reunion is off. The former volunteers who live in the DC area plan to get together there anyway, and to keep the rest of us in the loop, until we can all meet instead at a later date. God willing and the creek don't rise, I'll be there.

Copyright © 2001 by Suzy McKee Charnas