Category Archives: War & Peace

Step Up for 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.

Picking Up Carolina’s Torture Trash

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.

Who Wants The Best Quaker Job There Is?

Plus, there’s still the unexpected. Next year there will be a new administration. And the talk of new big wars is in the air, from every side; where or when isn’t clear, but the urge to strike out at somebody is definitely there.

For our purpose here, all this adds up to steady work for Quaker House. it’s the only concrete Quaker peace project next to a major military base: it’s where the rubber of talk about “peace witness” hits the road travelled every day by the war machine.

And one other thing the American public seems happy to forget is that the war machine is still growing. Quaker House organized a conference in 2011 to mark the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s warning about the burgeoning growth of what he dubbed the “military industrial complex.” He was prophetic: it had kept burgeoning for that half-century since then.

And it’s still burgeoning, bigger now than then, despite whatever you’ve read or been told about “winding down.” Militarism is as American as apple pie; even more so.

The current Quaker House Co-Directors, Steve & Lynn Newsom, have been plenty busy too. And they’ll be retiring in late 2017. So it’s time to find their successors.

The Price of Prophecy: The Carolina Trial of Willie Frye

“As Friends, we must rise above the homophobic hysteria sweeping the country and seek to be a voice of reason, concern, and spiritual insight. We cannot afford to lose the soul of Quakerism by allowing ourselves to be caught up in the current compulsion to condemn and exclude. Naturally, we are stirred by the gay and lesbian rights movement. The civil rights movement of the sixties had much the same effect. Those of us who grew up in the South resisted and criticized it; we were hostile to it and felt threatened by it but, in the end, it compelled us to look within and what we found was raw prejudice that would not stand the objective scrutiny of the Inner Light.

The strength of Quakerism has always been found in our willingness to expose ourselves to that kind of examination and our further willingness to follow the revelation that the Light brings. It has been that willingness that has set us apart from other denominations and made us pioneers in areas of which we are now proud. It is time for us to hark back to our basic concepts in dealing with the present issue. The process has not failed us in the past. It will not fail us now if we have the courage to engage ourselves in it.”

A Quaker Memorial Day

While much of the rest of the U.S. population is involved in or watching Memorial Day events centered on those killed in our wars, I hope Quakers will make room for a different approach to this observance.
To be sure, Friends have much to remember, and many to memorialize in regard to war also. For one thing, there were many Quakers who, despite what is called the Peace testimony, felt obliged to take up arms in one war or another; their number is large, and we are best advised not to deceive ourselves about that.

At the same time, in all these wars, where Quakers were present, significant numbers of them have stuck to the testimony and declined involvement in combat. The specifics vary with the wars, and personalities; the stories are quite varied. But many underwent awful ordeals, and not a few paid for their testimony with their lives.

Reflecting on what I know of this, my thoughts turned to the most lethal of U.S. wars (so far), the Civil War of 1861-1865.