Rotary’s commitment to peace

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Ain’t gonna study war no more ...” – Down By the Riverside

What would you say if one of your kids announced that they wanted to go to college to study peace?

No matter your politics, and mine edge closer to a peace sign than a dollar sign, I bet it might nettle you.

Peace?

Are you kidding me?

When my friend Michael McDermott declared a major in philosophy at Loyola College — back when a spice factory perfumed the night air above the Inner Harbor — his father said: “What are you going to do with that? Get a job at McCormick’s picking fly [dung] out of pepper?”

At least philosophy is a subject the average American parent knows is worthless.

Peace is a pear more prickly. Ask Jimmy Carter, the laughingstock ex-president who has worked harder to ease conflict and improve quality of life for the world’s poor than anyone in memory. He has little more to show for it than self-respect and a Nobel Prize.

Oh yes, and nearly eliminating Guinea worm disease in Africa and Asia. Thus go the marginalized fools for whom our culture has had little use in the past 30 years.

Not so at Rotary International, the world’s first service club organization — launched in 1905 with the motto “Service Above Self” — which reports global membership at more than 1.2 million.

In 2002, the Rotary began awarding World Peace Fellowships to complement its 60-year tradition of Ambassadorial Scholarships.

I’ve seen the Rotary emblem — an Art Deco industrial cog — on roadway signs my whole life. There’s one on Belair Road at Fullerton Avenue with meeting times for the Kingsville/Perry Hall club. But I never knew what the group was about until seeing a full-page Rotary ad for peace in, of all places, The Paris Review.

What particularly appeals to me about the Rotary commitment — full tuition, room and board and a living stipend for students pursuing graduate degrees — is that they are an old-school, business and professional group solidly in the mainstream.

In my mind, Rotarians resemble the top-hatted, mustachioed Monopoly man. That’s not true — at least not today — but the idea is important in a status-driven culture where it’s easy to dismiss people who bang pots and pans on the street for peace and jobs as kooks.

More difficult to ignore is a call for peace from some of the most successful and conservative members of our community. 

“The Rotary is 103 years old,” said Ed Underriner, a member from Reisterstown. “Among our goals has always been the promotion of world peace.”

The Maryland district, which includes Washington, is now reviewing applicants. Those who make the cut will be forwarded to Rotary headquarters in Evanston, Ill. By year’s end, up to 60 scholars will be chosen.

Paola Adrizola, a native of Bolivia and a city of chronic unrest ironically called La Paz, is a candidate from Maryland this year.

“What got my attention was the focus on international cooperation for achieving peace,” said Adrizola, 24, who went to high school in Bremen, Germany and earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas.

“The question of world peace is huge,” she said. “But having lived all over the world, I’ve found that educating people about what you’ve learned about different cultures is a small contribution to peace.”

(Adrizola lives and works in Washington. An especially exotic part of the world she has not seen is Baltimore. She plans to remedy that with a visit to a cousin she has never met: Christian Tremblay, a Peabody Institute graduate who plays violin with the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra.)

“One of the questions we ask candidates is how they would handle the war in Iraq, how they would handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Rotary official David Klaus, a former Peace Corps volunteer and retired World Bank employee.

“There may not be a right answer to such questions,” said Klaus, 62. “But we want to see how their minds work.”

A friend of mine who lives on a sailboat — like Philip Berrigan and Kurt Vonnegut, a soldier transfigured by war into a pacifist — recently expressed an idea about achieving peace so profoundly simple, it was as though I had new ears.

“There is so much to be done to promote the good,” he said, “that protesting the negative seems a waste of time.”

Rafael Alvarez is an author and screenwriter based in Baltimore and Los Angeles. His books — fiction, journalism and essays — include “The Fountain of Highlandtown” and “Storyteller.” He can be reached at ralvarez@baltimoreexaminer.com.

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