Category Archives: Cross-Generational Issues

New Issue of “Types & Shadows” – Quaker Arts Journal-Online NOW (Free)

You can read and browse it here free:  

Types & Shadows is the quarterly journal of the Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts. (FQA) It first appeared in 1996, and has been produced ever since by dedicated and creative volunteers.

The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) were strongly against the arts for their first two centuries, regarding them as “vain” and hazardous distractions from plainness and more serious and “spiritual” things.

Their evolution away from this prohibition is traced in an FQA Booklet, Beyond Uneasy Tolerance, which is also available free on the FQA website.

Continue reading New Issue of “Types & Shadows” – Quaker Arts Journal-Online NOW (Free)

Guilford College in Crisis (Again? Yes.)

This weekend I was thinking about trouble at Guilford College, when a memory popped up: during my college years, a B- was not a bad grade.

Okay, it wasn’t great, especially if you were aiming at the honor roll or grad school.

But it was above a C; over the line (if just barely) into the upper tier of the scale.

That was then: now it’s another century —hell, another millennium. Things have changed.

What about, in 2025, a grade of BBB-? Continue reading Guilford College in Crisis (Again? Yes.)

Gwynne Dyer: Happy(??) Climate New Year

Welcome to ‘Uncharted Territory’

Gwynne Dyer, January 2, 2025

New Year is when we do the accounts for the year, and the bad news always gets top billing: how many wars are going on, how big were the natural disasters, etc.? Climate change now has its own slot in this annual accounting, and here is what the climate pundits will say.

First they will acknowledge that 2024 has been the hottest year since we began keeping records a few centuries ago. This will be accompanied by the usual clucking about how naughty we have all been, not cutting our greenhouse gas emissions fast enough. Continue reading Gwynne Dyer: Happy(??) Climate New Year

Henry Taylor: A Quaker Poet Departs — A Holiday Read

Late  one spring morning in 1986, I was creeping along the edge of Ox Road, Virginia route 123, driving with one hand, and shoving mail into the boxes on posts with the other.  I was a substitute rural mail carrier,  working a route just south of the seemingly nonexistent town of Fairfax Station.

FairfaxStation-VA-Sign

Beyond the mailboxes, prefab McMansions were going up on every side, as fast as the builders could hammer them together.

It was the second year of Ronald Reagan’s second term, and the woods along Ox Road were swarming with smalltime winners in the stampede for the billions  that the Gipper and his cronies were shoveling into a grand military buildup. The new settlers were devouring the woods along Ox Road like nuclear powered termites. Their contract profits were  pouring with the concrete under the rows of McMansions, markers of their status as suburban arrivistes.

My Malibu wagon, for postal work. (I didn’t wear a tie delivering the mail.)

Reagan’s frantic rearmament was meant to drive the Evil Empire of Communist Russia into bankruptcy and oblivion trying to match it.

The bankruptcy drive was ultimately successful, but the big plan soon capsized like the Titanic after the iceberg, sunk by the unexpected vigor of the aftermath:  who could have suspected that the Commies’ dark oblivion would turn out to be a den full of new monsters?

Continue reading Henry Taylor: A Quaker Poet Departs — A Holiday Read

A Quaker Doing His Incognito Bit in North Carolina Politics

 

Lately it’s been hard to find yard signs for the disgraced pizza-and-pornstar NC Republican gubernatorial candidate, Lt. Governor Mark Robinson. But this one was in Burlington a few days back.

Burlington is in North Carolina’s Alamance County, once notorious as a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan back in the day, Neo-Confederates now. A 35-foot statue of a rebel soldier still guards the county courthouse, and the monument itself is surrounded by a thick wrought iron fence and plenty of Don’t-Tread-On-Me attitude.

The county voted against Obama twice by ten-point margins, and for Trump in 2016 by 14 and in 2020 by 8.

During Covid it was a locus for pandemic mask and mandate defiance. When Hispanic Democrat Ricky Hurtado managed to unseat a Republican state rep a few years back, the supermajority GOP legislature promptly re-drew the district and pushed Hurtado out in 2022.

Nevertheless, to lift our spirits on Thursday, Oct. 3, the Fair Wendy and I drove straight into Alamance and then Burlington, to a modest storefront on the edge of downtown. If too much of the county is still stuck in a revanchist fantasy past, this was an outpost of a very different Alamance future that is beginning to unfold.

Alamance County NC Democratic Party office

Yes, Alamance has Democrats. And they’re on the move. Their monthly meeting is the first Thursday, and inside, the joint was jumping.

The session was predictably focused on the last climactic weeks of the current  campaign; but there were a couple of important preliminaries :

First, a discussion of relief efforts for the hurricane-devastated city of Asheville and other communities in western NC. (My contribution was some bottled water.) The County Chair, Ron Osborne (above) knows such emergency work inside and out: he specialized in it for Duke Power as an electrical engineer, managing large crews who helped get the lights back on in the wake of dozens of the worst storms and floods from Katrina to Sandy. Osborne pointed out the safest and most useful ways for those of us who managed to dodge the deluge of Helene to do our bit.

Ron Osborne holds a prized possession, a book autographed by Jimmy Carter, as he speaks of the 39th president’s achievements at turning his religious faith into continuing practice.

Then he turned to a more pleasant landmark, the 100th birthday of Jimmy Carter. The 39th president was clearly a model for Osborne: another southerner, who publicly renounced his segregationist heritage, and overcame the experience of defeat in 1980 to build a long and uniquely productive post-political career with a multitude of projects, from building houses for the poor to preventing wars and reducing the toll of guinea worm disease from multimillions annually to thirteen (yes, 13) cases in 2023.

Seneca Rogers, a school board candidate in Burlington, addresses the session.

Osborne even made a pilgrimage which I long hoped to make, to Plains, Georgia, to join in the Sunday Bible classes Carter taught for more than 40 years whenever he was in town.

Then to the main business of the meeting, which was a series of rapid-fire short speeches by candidates for local offices, county commission, and district judgeships. The multicultural character of the lineup was a standing rebuke to the dogged whiteness of the rival party (does Mark Robinson count? Thats above my paygrade . . . .)

The enthusiasm level was high, and the candidates welcomed the intensity before them in the campaign’s frenzied final month.

Jaded pundits might still be noting that the Carolina GOP has been  gerrymandering and suppressing votes nonstop for fourteen years (true) and is counting on the institutional bias it has been cementing to hold back the rising insurgency growing around the corner in their Alamance stronghold (true again.)

Your faithful blogger, with the sticker he was awarded at the meeting’s conclusion, since the supply of the ”Old White Geezers for Harris-Walz” stickers was gone. They accepted my solemn affirmation that I’m an emeritus member of the youth cohort.

And to further harsh my buzz, they can carp, “So Alamance is happening; fine. But there’s 100 counties in NC, and what about the other 99??” And true, I don’t get out that much.
Finally, they’ll repeat that the polls are all tight as a tick, margin of error, yada yada. (Undeniable.) So is my optimism just whistling Dixie??

Well, I’ve resigned from the Pundit Prediction Panel, so I’ll concede the prognosticators may turn out to be right. However, I’ll recklessly stick a toe back in this muddy pool, and forecast that, at least in Alamance County, the NC Democrats in 2024 will  — wait for itDo BETTER.

Will that be enough to save us?

Check back with me in a month.

[Note: Here’s the part for Quakers: Ron Osborne is a longtime member of Spring Friends Meeting, which has been in Alamance County for more than 250 years. He’s also a Quaker history buff, like me.  He’s enjoying his retirement, and I don’t think he likes political campaigning much more than hurricanes, but like saving lives devastated by the latter, helping rescue democracy by the former is a part of his low-key but diligent and distinctive Quaker witness.]