In our previous post, we noted that Philadelphia Yearly Meeting officials have proposed a budget which includes numerous staff cuts. Among the positions on the chopping block is the Young Adult Friends Coordinator. Coming soon to Philadelphia YM? But the post will not be dropped without a— thee should pardon the expression, Friend — fight. … Continue reading The YAFS Strike Back! Philly YM To See Budget Cut Pushback
NOTE: This post is updated below. The Great Quaker Turnover just got a MAJOR jolt, In Billy Penn’s fair city: I’m still working to confirm the specifics, but usually reliable reports say that several staff cuts were announced at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting yesterday (March 29, 2011).
Some weeks earlier, an enterprising Irish student of TV production named Cormac had tracked me down on the net. He had discovered that in 1967 I was part of a large antiwar protest in Buffalo New York, organized by Quakers from near New York City, during which we walked across the Canadian border near Niagara Falls.
Sure, I remembered. We were carrying medical supplies for Canadian Quakers to distribute among wounded civilians on all sides of the Vietnam War; my stash was a packet of band-aids.
It was illegal for Americans to do this, under something called the Trading With The Enemy Act. So our border walk was open civil disobedience, and we were prepared to be arrested.
But we weren’t arrested. I didn’t recall publishing anything about this protest, one of many from those years; so how did Cormac, who emailed me from Ireland, know about it, and why was he interested?
Turns out there was an Irishman named George Lennon living near Buffalo at the time. He joined the border protest and noted it in his diary.
Now, 43 years later, Cormac and two classmates were making a postmortem documentary about George Lennon, based on this diary. (Decades earlier, Lennon had been part of the Irish war for independence from Britain, then later emigrated to the U.S., where he evolved into something of a pacifist.) Surfing for material, they found one mention of the Buffalo border protest: turns out it was by yours truly, buried in a talk to a Canadian group of Quakers, back in 1997, which I had since uploaded to an obscure web page (and completely forgotten about).
Which once more goes to show the marvels of the internet, the glory of google, yada yada.
This info has been around for some time, from reliable sources, and has been bottled up long enough: Friends General Conference is set to name Barry Crossno as its new General Secretary. As was true of the other two Quaker big groups which have hired CEOs in recent months (AFSC & FCNL), Crossno is a … Continue reading Breaking: FGC Set to Tap Barry Crossno as New General Secretary
Ah, January. It’s the season of snow and ice and other annoyances. But there’s an UP-side: in the supermarkets I can find tubs of fat, dark, juicy blueberries. I love ‘em. Call me an old anti-oxidant junkie. (In fact, some of you might have noticed that my Gmail address is supposed to be “wild blueberries” … Continue reading Will It Ruin The Planet If I Buy These Blueberries??