FAQs for Friends– Part #9 (The Last Part): Jesus & The Golden Gate Bridge Since it’s been a few weeks since Part #8 was posted, we’ll repeat the last Query from #8, as a way of catching up. (To read earlier posts in this series, click here.) Q. Did Anybody Else Besides These Early Friends … Continue reading FAQs for Friends– Part #9 (The Last Part): Jesus & The Golden Gate Bridge
My “beat” was the offbeat, story ideas outside the paper’s weekly regimen of muckraking about politics and other public corruptions, all plentiful in the region.
Instead I wrote the stories readers wanted but no one else had thought of:
— a major profile of Rabbi Emil Bronner, creator of a famous brand of peppermint oil soap. It was sold in bottles wrapped with big blue labels covered by tiny white print detailing the “All-One-God-Faith” religion, which he had likewise invented. (The tiny print made perfect sense if you were stoned enough.) I also did one of the first major pieces about the home birth movement, which was growing fast in the area; pardon the pun.
And
The cast of “Pathway to Freedom” is hard at work now, learning their lines, practicing scenes, and between rehearsals helping out with technical and scenery preparation.
I got to sit in on the first read-through of the entire script. The cast members sat in the ampitheatre as the dusk fell, and the stunning song of wood thrushes filled the surrounding forest.
By the time the drama’s shattering climax had been recited, night had fallen. The green trees were inky silhouettes. Faces and script pages were lit by glowing cell phone screens. And the story was as powerful as the first time I saw it, more than ten years ago.
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.
My friend & colleague Stephen Angell read my new book “Meetings,” and here’s what he said:
A vivid, lively, kaleidoscopic self-portrait of a fascinating Catholic-turned-Quaker journalist, writer and activist. Chuck Fager’s autobiography is one of the best that I’ve seen of an aspiring nonviolent revolutionary’s Life in the Sixties. (The early seventies are covered, too, in which he and other radicals took a more conservative turn.) Fager seems to be everywhere, providing revealing insights from interviews with Phil Berrigan and E. F. Schumacher, among others. He also provides wonderful portraits of Quakers who made their mark on the world and who deserve not to be forgotten, Sam Levering, Morris Mitchell, and Louis Alger, among them. Even topics such as “how I came to love the Bible” are presented in a sprightly and thought-provoking fashion; one of his unforgettable characters, the Prophet Jeremiah, hasn’t been alive in thousands of years!