Opportunity: Director of Quaker House
Quaker House, a landmark Friends peace witness, is seeking a Director to continue an active program promoting peace and non-violence. It is located in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of Ft. Bragg, a major US military base.
I don’t think any of us who saw that image has ever forgotten it: the rail-thin general gripping the snub-nosed pistol, the defiant prisoner’s teeth clenched, his bushy black hair standing up straight and unvanquished even as the bullet smashed into his temple, the blood spray just starting at the camera-frozen instant of death.
I didn’t really want to go to Vietnam, but we still envied those hotshot writers and photographers who flew around the world, covering the really big stories, while we were stuck writing up local antiwar rallies and chasing school board scandals.
Pru and I also had babies in common, one apiece, tho hers almost never happened. Pru’s live-in boyfriend Hal was a quiet, sweet guy, who had dropped out of college and was on the way to becoming a carpenter, tho I don’t think he realized it at the time. He just knew he was hopelessly bad at the intellectual pretensions and palaver of most of the rest of us who lived in the shadow of Harvard, which spread from a jumble of plain red brick buildings a mile or so away. That difference of outlook was a source of continuing but low-key tension between him and Pru.
So when Pru turned up pregnant, it was both an accident and a problem. The accident was easy to figure: birth control worked almost all the time. But almost isn’t always. The problem was that even covering local news stories kept us on the go and away from home a lot. And while Pru liked my wife Tish, who was then mostly taking care of our daughter, Pru was determined not to give up journalism to spend several years changing diapers and being captive to a schedule of nursing, naps, and toddler tantrums.
Which meant she decided to have an abortion. In those days, abortion was still outlawed in most of the country, including Massachusetts. But just a year earlier, it had been made legal in New York state. So what was a crime in Cambridge could be done freely in Albany, a three-hour drive to the west.
At her stage, it was supposed to be relatively quick, or so we had been told. A kind of vacuum cleaner would suck Pru’s uterus clean, leaving behind only a small jar of bloody mush.
Of course, Pru agonized about it. She talked to me, she talked to Tish, she talked to her other friends. I was not a fan of abortion, then or now, but agreed that in the end it was up to her.
One morning she and Hal climbed into their old Volkswagen Beetle and got on the Massachussetts Turnpike, Albany-bound. We figured they’d be back in a day or two.
Quaker House: Still The Best Quaker Job There Is As Quaker House of Fayetteville NC begins the search for a new Director (or Co-Directors), the situation there is in many ways different from my time as Director, from 2001 to 2012: then we faced a couple of big wars. Today’s many small wars are almost entirely invisible to the U. … Continue reading Quaker House: Still The Best Quaker Job There Is
My crystal ball app got accidentally deleted from my phone, so this is only speculation. But consider:
— The current election pits a loose cannon ignoramus, against a supporter of the Iraq war, the Libya overthrow, and more, with ties to war-loving Neo-cons. Like them or hate them, I predict that one of them will win.
— And by next summer, the winner’s minions will be settling in at the Pentagon, the CIA, and the many other secret war agencies.
So I also predict (wait for it) . . . Quaker House will still be plenty busy.
Today was a good day to think about torture. And a good day to do something about it. Like picking up the trash.
Why today? Well, actually any day is a good day for to do something about it, and especially in the USA, where the public keeps getting quick glimpses of the rotted, stinking remains of the American torture program of the previous decade. And reminders of its potential for renewal.
Just snatches of horror, that flash by on their way to being shoved under the rug of impunity, and stuffed down the memory hole of forgetting & “Looking Forward.”
This past week there were several such awful glimpses, from a dump of newly-released stomach-churning CIA documents. But we won’t, you know, dwell on them.
Here in North Carolina, tho, a stubborn handful of us have refused to forget. For almost eleven years, we’ve done all sorts of protests aimed at tearing holes, even tiny ones, in the fabric of forgetting. We’ve tried conferences, rallies, marches, petitions, reports, you name it.
And almost four years ago, we added a new tactic: picking up the trash.