We're surrounded by people whose basic philosophy seems to be "I've got something, at least, and I'm going to protect it at any cost! Keep away!" They remind me of lines by Aldous Huxley from Ape and Essence:
The leech's kiss,
The squid's embrace,
The prurient ape's defiling touch:
And do I like the human race?
No, not much.
THIS MEANS YOU. KEEP OUT!
Dress it up in whatever religious piety you want, it still seems a rather squalid view of life.
Fortunately, if we look for them, we also find we are surrounded by people who are much, much better than that.
Over the past year, I've lived with some sixty stories by Returned Peace Corps Volunteers who served in Africa. These essays cover volunteers from the beginnings of Peace Corps 50 years ago to recent PCVs (as the volunteers are known). They are now published in a book I've edited, One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo: Fifty Years of Amazing Peace Corps Stories, Volume One: Africa.
It's an amazing collection--and I say so not because I edited it (and contributed to it), but because I have learned so much more that I thought I could about Peace Corps and about the best of Americans. Having been a PCV, I thought I knew the experience pretty well. Perhaps I did, but I know it much better now, through the words in these stories, words that (by the way) give the full picture, not the sanitized version that the bureaucrats might want us to read.
Even if you have never been in Peace Corps, have never met anyone who has, I suspect you would enjoy these stories as much as I have. They help restore a bit of needed idealism in a time when the very idea of idealism is under fire.
I make nothing off this book, and was not paid for my editing, which took hundreds and hundreds of hours. I did it because of what my own experience means to me... and continued because I fell in love with each and every writer in the volume.
Buy the book. Feel a little better about America, and about humanity.
Do I like the human race? Very much. If that means you, too... don't keep out.