I’ve been lucky enough to have two house­guests this week: Micah Bales and Faith Kel­ley (no rela­tion). They’ve come up to the Philadel­phia area to help pub­li­cize a gath­er­ing of young adult Friends that will take place in Wichita in a few months. Before they left, I got them to share their excite­ment for the con­fer­ence in front of my web­cam.

Inter­view with Faith Kel­ley & Micah Bales, two of the orga­niz­ers of the upcom­ing young adult Friends con­fer­ence in Wichita Kansas.

FAITH: This is an invi­ta­tion for a gath­er­ing for young adult Friends ages 18–35 from all the branches of the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends from all across the con­ti­nent. It’s going to be in Wichita Kansas from May 28–31. It’s a time to get together and learn about each other, to hear each other’s sto­ries and wor­ship together. We’re really excited by this oppor­tu­nity to have peo­ple who have never been to these before and to have peo­ple who have been to other gath­er­ings to come back.
MICAH: A lot of the advance mate­r­ial is already up online so you can get a good idea what this con­fer­ence is going to be about and to get a sense of how to pre­pare your­self for a gath­er­ing like this. We’ll be get­ting together with folks from all over the coun­try, Canada and Mexico–we’re hop­ing a lot of His­panic Friends show up and we’ve already trans­lated the web­site into Span­ish. Reg­is­tra­tion is set up already; early reg­is­tra­tion goes until April 15. Air­fare to Wichita is look­ing pretty good at the moment; if you reg­is­ter early you’re likely to get a fairly decent plane ticket out.
FAITH: We’re hop­ing peo­ple will choose to car­pool together. So get orga­nized, reg­is­ter early and look at the advance mate­ri­als online.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
2010 Young Adult Friends Conference

Over on Friends Jour­nal site, some recent stats on Friends mostly in the US and Canada. Writ­ten by Mar­garet Fraser, the head of FWCC, a group that tries to unite the dif­fer­ent bod­ies of Friends, it’s a bit of cold water for most of us. Offi­cial num­bers are down in most places despite what­ever offi­cial opti­mism might exist. Favorite line: “Per­haps those who leave are noticed less.” I’m sure P.R. hacks in var­i­ous Quaker orga­ni­za­tions are burn­ing the mid­night oil writ­ing response let­ters to the edi­tor spin­ning the num­bers to say things are look­ing up.

She points to a sad decline both in yearly meet­ings affil­i­ated with Friends United Meet­ing and in those affil­i­ated with Friends Gen­eral Con­fer­ence. A curios­ity is that this decline is not seen in three of the four yearly meet­ings that are dual affil­i­ated. These blended yearly meet­ings are going through var­i­ous degrees of iden­tity cri­sis and hand-wringing over their sta­tus and yet their own mem­ber­ship num­bers are strong. Could it be that seri­ous the­o­log­i­cal wrestling and com­pli­cated spir­i­tual iden­ti­ties cre­ate health­ier reli­gious bod­ies than mono­cul­tural groupings?

The big news is in the south: “His­panic Friends Churches” in Mex­ico and Cen­tral Amer­ica are boom­ing, with spillover in el Norte as work­ers move north to get jobs. There’s sur­pris­ingly lit­tle inter­ac­tion between these newly-arrived Spanish-speaking Friends and the the old Main Line Quaker estab­lish­ment (maybe not sur­pris­ing really, but still sad). I’ll leave you with a chal­lenge Mar­garet gives readers:

One ques­tion that often puz­zles me is why so many His­panic Friends
con­gre­ga­tions are meet­ing in churches belong­ing to other denom­i­na­tions.
I would love to see estab­lished Friends meet­ings with their own
prop­erty shar­ing space with His­panic Friends. It would be an
oppor­tu­nity to share growth and chal­lenges together.

Non​vi​o​lence​.org read­ers may not be aware that my per­sonal site has been the talk of the polit­i­cal inter­net for the last few days. Since post­ing an “account of get­ting a phone call from a CBS News pub­li­cist”, I’ve been linked to by a Who’s Who of blog­ging glit­er­atti: Won­kette, Instapun­dit, The Volokh Con­spir­acy, Lit­tle Green Foot­balls, Rather­Biased, etc. For a short time yes­ter­day, the story was a part of the second-ranked arti­cle on Technorati’s Pol­i­tics Atten­tion index.

A hack from CBS News called me to say they were doing a pro­gram on an issue that’s cen­tral to Nonviolence.org’s man­date: con­sci­en­tious resis­tance to mil­i­tary ser­vice. After look­ing over the mate­r­ial, I thought the inter­views of resisters who have fled to Canada would be inter­est­ing to my read­ers and so wrote a short entry on it. Think­ing it all a lit­tle funny that a pub­li­cist would care about Non​vi​o​lence​.org, I men­tioned the inci­dent in the “Sto­ries of Non​vi​o​lence​.org” sec­tion of my per­sonal site. One by one the lead­ing polit­i­cal sites of the blo­gos­phere have run the story as fur­ther proof of the vast left-wing main­stream media con­spir­acy. It’s rather funny actually.

I have to won­der is who’s kid­ding who with all this feigned out­rage? For those miss­ing the irony gene: the Non​vi​o​lence​.org Pay­Pal account cur­rently has a bal­ance $6.18, the bulk of which comes from the last donation–$5.00 back on Novem­ber 20th. My cor­ner of the left wing con­spir­acy is funded by the vast per­sonal wealth I accu­mu­late as a book­store clerk.

Wonkette’s pages adver­tise “spon­sor­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties,” she’s a recent cover girl on New York Times Mag­a­zine, her hus­band is an edi­tor at New York mag­a­zine and in Octo­ber she cashed out her blog­ging fame for a $275,000 advance for her first novel (“It’s not Brid­get Jones does Wash­ing­ton, it’s Nick Hornby does pol­i­tics”: good grief). Eugene Volokh has clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court (for San­dra Day O’Connor), teaches law at UCLA and just had a big op-ed in the Times. Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds teaches law at the Uni­ver­sity of Ten­nessee, has served on White House advi­sory pan­els, and is a paid cor­re­spon­dent for MSNBC. Yet he, like the oth­ers, calls a two minute phone call “recruiting”?

I’m begin­ning to think the real inter­est comes from the fact that this top tier of blog­gers is totally in bed (lit­er­ally) with the MSM. Their income comes from their con­nec­tions with media and polit­i­cal power. Their carefully-crafted fas­cade of snark­ish inde­pen­dence would crum­ble if their phone logs were made pub­lic. They’re not really blog­ging in their paja­mas, folks.

By men­tion­ing the exis­tance of blog pub­li­cists, I’ve threat­ened to blow their cover. Pay no atten­tion to the men behind the cur­tains: my social gaffe was in pub­licly admit­ting that the main­stream media courts polit­i­cal blogs. Kudos to jour­nal­ist Derek Rose on admit­ting the practice:

But why shouldn’t a news organization’s pub­lic­ity depart­ment court blog­gers? As a MSM mem­ber, I get emails from TV flacks all the time pro­mot­ing their scoops. From ABC, for exam­ple, I’ve received emails regard­ing a tape they got of the Belt­way sniper’s call to the Rockville police; Bar­bara Wal­ters’ Hillary Clin­ton inter­view; and their ‘Azzam the Amer­i­can’ video … as well as a Rush Lim­baugh drug laun­der­ing story that never panned out. I even got atten­tion from pub­li­cists when I was work­ing for a news­pa­per that didn’t have a 20th of the cir­cu­la­tion of Instapundit…

Rose aside, there’s incred­i­ble dis­tor­tion in the “report­ing,” a term I have to use very loosely. Won­kette says “Kel­ley claims that a CBS min­ion put the screws to him to post some­thing about a ’60 Min­utes’ pack­age on con­sci­en­tious objec­tors” yet all read­ers have to do is fol­low the link to see I never said any­thing like that. Why do the cream of blog­gers feel like a posse of self-absorbed sev­enth graders? When I started Non​vi​o​lence​.org back in 1995, I thought the brave new polit­i­cal world of the inter­net might be All the President’s Men. Boy was I wrong: it turns it’s just Heathers. God help us.

A guest piece by Amanda

Orig­i­nally posted as a com­ment to “My Exper­i­ments with Plain­ness”, Amanda’s story deserves its own post: “I’ve noticed that I’m becom­ing really attached to my clothes. As I was grimly and method­i­cally culling my closet, a whiny, des­per­ate voice in my head piped up, and I began to have a seri­ous con­ver­sa­tion with myself… [A] reser­va­tion I have is that plain dress­ing may just be another way of telegraph­ing the image I want the world to have of me. Only instead of that mes­sage being ‘I am cool and wor­thy of your atten­tion and envy’ the mes­sage might be ‘I’m so hoooooly’.”

Hi there!

I am 21, and the only mem­ber of my fam­ily who attends meet­ings of Friends. (I am not a Friend yet, being young to the whole expe­ri­ence, and an ex-catholic, and hav­ing wan­dered for sev­eral years in strange paths!! How­ever, I am tak­ing it very seri­ously, and read­ing all I can get my hands on. I feel a strong call towards plain dress, and have gone through fits and starts of it spon­ta­neously, even as a Catholic child. At 12, I decided I would no longer wear colours in imi­ta­tion of all the siants habits I saw in my books, and my friends and I (I grew up in rural Canada, home­schooled, the old­est of 11 kids, an anar­chon­ism to begin with) tried sewing our own clothes our­selves, praire dresses and pinafores.

When I was 14, we moved to the States, to the sub­urbs, away from our uber-traditional Catholic enclave, and I began to nor­mal­ize myself out of the “home­schooler uni­form” (its own sort of plain dress — those ter­ri­ble jumpers with ankle socks and can­vas sneak­ers! Ack!) and into main­stream fash­ion, where I’ve been solidly entrenched ever since, espe­cially since mov­ing to NYC.

I am now in the process of purg­ing a lot of my stuff, and seek­ing a sim­pler way of liv­ing. I quit smok­ing, and have decided that drink­ing as a recre­ational activ­ity is out unless it’s an orga­nized event. This may become more strict in time, but I have to ease into it a lit­tle bit. I got rid of sev­eral bags of clothes and a bunch of house­hold items I was hoard­ing “just in case I might need them some­day”. Clas­sic. A lot of things have pre­cip­i­tated this, but one of them is my absolute hor­ror at how I’ve gone from mak­ing $12,000 a year to nearly $30,000, and I still am sav­ing no money at all, nor am I mak­ing any last­ing purchase/investments, etc…I’m just spend­ing it on vain and use­less things. I’ve noticed as well, that I’m start­ing to have more and more big-salary fan­ta­sises, and recre­ation­ally go to stare in shop win­dows at clothes, not just to appre­ci­ate the asthetic value of some of the most gor­geous gar­ments in the world (after all, this is Man­hat­tan) but also to drool and covet. I found, while exam­in­ing my con­cience, that it wasn’t even the thing — the piece of cloth­ing that I wanted, and it wasn’t a sim­ple desire to have some­thing pretty. I saw myself link­ing these clothes and things to my self worth and future hap­pi­ness. You know:

“Once I am thin and rich enough to wear this, I will be happy. I will be so happy. So very happy. Every­thing will be per­fect, and my hair will always be straight, and I will have my teeth veneered, and I will have a hand­some man who wor­ships the ground I walk on, and three bright-eyed chil­dren who appear only on Sun­day morn­ings to snug­gle with me in my California-king-sized bed with the white crisp sheets, while I lan­guidly smile at their frol­ic­ing and plan to buy them a golden retriever puppy later that after­noon as I stroll through an antique fair and buy a vin­tage wicker bird cage, which I will fill with finches and hang from my sun-drenched porch in my sec­ond house in the south of France, and I be happy. So happy. So very happy, if I am only thin and rich enough to wear those clothes.”

I really, really woke up one after­noon to find myself stand­ing on 5th Ave and 59th street, on my lunch break, star­ing in a win­dow, and hav­ing that fan­tasy with absolutely no inter­nal ironic monolouge at all. At all.

It com­plet­ley pan­icked me.

I’ve noti­cied that I’m becom­ing really attatched to my clothes. As I was grimly and method­i­cally culling my closet, a whiney, des­per­ate voice in my head piped up, and I began to have a seri­ous con­ver­sa­tion with myself.

“You can’t get rid of so many of your cool clothes. The clothes are you, they’re a huge part of who you are.”

“Wait,” the other voice in my head, the stern one, said (I am a schiz­o­phrenic and so am I) “You are say­ing that I am what I wear. That’s sup­posed to make me want to keep them? Do you even hear what you’re saying?”

The first voice was totally backtracking.

“No, no, no, I didn’t mean you were your clothes, or that you were only worth as much as your clothes, why do you always have to be so lit­eral? I meant that your clothes tell peo­ple about you, about who you are and what you believe in. They’re an out­side sign of who you are.”

“Ah.” said the sec­ond voice, rather sar­cas­ti­cally, I thought, “So we’d rather have peo­ple learn every­thing they need to know about us by our clothes, instead of hav­ing them take the time to get to know us from expe­ri­ence of us.”

“Well, that’s all very well!” said the first voice. “That’s nice in an ideal world. But the truth is, the sad truth is, most peo­ple won’t take the time to get to know you if you don’t seem cool.”

“Wow.” said the sec­ond voice. “Wow. This has noth­ing to do with fash­ion, does it? This totally has to do with your infe­ri­or­ity com­plex, dat­ing back to about sec­ond grade, doesn’t it?”

At this point the first voice began to suck its thumb, and I real­ized to my hor­ror that the sec­ond voice was right. It’s always right.

“Fash­ion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.” ~Quentin Crisp

I’ve actu­ally begun buy­ing my per­son­al­ity in a store, and telling myself that it’s okay because I’m buy­ing it in a thrift store. I know from per­sonal expe­ri­ence that the right head­scarf or pair of vin­tage shoes, or funny t-shirt will sud­denly raise the value of my social cur­rency off the charts. And I’m becom­ing really depen­dent on that, to the point where I’ve started to actu­ally feel anx­i­ety around my “style” and my clothes. I iron­i­cally played the role of fash­ion police for a boy at a party who was mock­ing me for being from Williams­burg, and although I was kid­ding around when I exco­ri­ated him for his American-Eagle shorts and surfer-boy hair, it struck me, I’m spout­ing all these “rules” as if I’m mock­ing them, but I actu­ally live by them, don’t I?

And I’ve increas­ingly begun to obey them out of fear instead of out of a love of neat clothes or a sense of aes­thetic. I have cooler clothes than ever, and sudenly I have a need to make more money so that I can keep look­ing cool, and keep fit­ting in, and keep prov­ing to every­one, most of all myself, that I should be invited to Angelica’s birth­day party because the whole rest of the class is and it’s not fair…oh wait. That was sec­ond grade.

Ben­jamin Franklin wrote: “Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is noth­ing in its nature to pro­duce hap­pi­ness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its fill­ing a vac­uum, it makes one. If it sat­is­fies one want, it dou­bles and tre­bles that want another way.”

This seems like a huge cliche, but you know, the more I think about it, the more it seems that the mod­ern hor­ror of cliches may have less to do with a love of orig­i­nal­ity than with a fear of the truth.

So those are the moti­va­tions — that much is worked out. But the prac­tice of it is hard. Was I expe­ri­en­ce­ing a gen­uine call­ing to plain dress as a child, or did I just read too much “Lit­tle House”? (Is there such a thing as too much “Lit­tle House”?) And now, am I just a costume-loving poser?

I feel a bizarre attrac­tion to head-covering as well, though I recoil with my whole post-feminist self from those pas­sages in the bible. I don’t think I believe in sub­mis­sion to any­body. In fact, I’m not sure even God wants me sub­mis­sive –I feel he wants my co-operation.

“I will not now call you ser­vants: for the ser­vant knoweth not what his lord doth. But I have called you friends: because all things what­so­ever I have heard of my Father, I have made known to you.” John 15:15

Another reser­va­tion I have is that plain dress­ing may just be another way of telegraph­ing the image I want the world to have of me. Only instead of that mes­sage being “I am cool and wor­thy of your atten­tion and envy” the mes­sage might be “I’m so hoooooly”. Or, per­haps more pos­i­tively, it might be a mes­sage that is “wit­ness” — a con­cept I am strug­gling with on its own — what if I make mis­takes and my wit­ness is mis­taken, etc.

My com­pro­mise was to get rid of all the clothes I’d bought just for atten­tion, all the clothes I was keep­ing for purely sen­ti­men­tal rea­sons, every­thing that didn’t fit, or match with any­thing else, etc. And to be hon­est, that just pared it down to where I can actu­ally fit all my clothes in my 1 closet and dresser, a feat hereto­fore unknown to me. Also, a big part of this move was to start tak­ing care of my clothes, some­thing I’ve never done. I’ve made an active dici­pline of some­thing as sim­ple as hang­ing up my clothes each night, as an act of respect and grat­i­tude. It occured to me that when I am so for­tu­nate as to have many poses­sions, it seems extremely wrong that I should mis­treat them the way I’ve been doing.

Wow. For­get plain dress, plain speech is going to be an even big­ger prob­lem. I’ve writ­ten a novel.

* blush *

Any­how, it is won­der­ful to see it dis­cussed, some­times I feel like I’m just nuts. I mean, I know I’m nuts, but I don’t like feel­ing that way.

in friend­ship,
Amanda

Here’s a web­site of “Jeremy Hinz­man, a U.S. Army sol­dier who became a a con­sci­en­tious objector”:http://www.jeremyhinzman.net/faq.html in the course of his ser­vice. His appli­ca­tions denied, he moved to Canada and is seek­ing polit­i­cal asy­lum there.
I find I can under­stand the issues all too well. In only a slightly-parallel uni­verse, I’d be in iraq myself instead of pub­lish­ing Non​vi​o​lence​.org. My father, a vet­eran who fought in the South Pacific in World War II, really wanted me to join the U.S. Navy and attend the Naval Acad­emy at Annapo­lis. For quite some time, I seri­ously con­sid­ered it. I am attracted to the idea of ser­vice and duty and putting in hard work for some­thing I believe in.
Hinzman’s story is get­ting a lot of main­stream cov­er­age, I sus­pect because the “escape to Canada” angle has so many Vietnam-era echoes that res­onate with that gen­er­a­tion. I wish Hinz­man would flesh out his web­site story though. His Fre­quently Asked Ques­tions leaves out some impor­tant details that could really make the story–why did he join the Army in the first place, what were some of the expe­ri­ences that led him to rethink his duty, etc. I’d rec­om­mend Jeff Paterson’s “Gulf War Refusenik”:http://jeff.paterson.net/ site, which includes lots of sto­ries includ­ing his own:
bq. “What am I going to do with my life?” has always been huge ques­tion of youth, and today in the wake of the hor­ror and tragedy of New York Sep­tem­ber 11th this ques­tion has increased impor­tance for mil­lions of young peo­ple. No one who has seen the images will ever for­get… If I hadn’t spent those four years in the Marine Corps, I might be inclined to fall into line now. Most of the time my unit trained to fight a war against peas­ants who dared to strug­gle against “Amer­i­can inter­ests” in their homelands-specifically Nicaragua, El Sal­vador, and Guatemala… Faced with this real­ity, I began the process of becom­ing un-American-meaning that the inter­ests of the peo­ple of the world began to weigh heav­ier than my self-interest. I real­ized that the world did not need or want another U.S. troop…
There are bound to be more sto­ries all the time of service-people who find a dif­fer­ent real­ity when they land on for­eign shores. How many will rethink their rela­tion­ship to the U.S. mil­i­tary. How many will fol­low Paterson’s exam­ple of becom­ing “un-American”?

Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tions, bet­ter known as “QUIP”, is a col­lec­tion of 50 Quaker pub­lish­ers, book­sellers and authors com­mit­ted to the “min­istry of the writ­ten word.” I often think of QUIP as a sup­port group of sorts for those of us who really believe that pub­lish­ing can make a dif­fer­ence. It’s also one of those places where dif­fer­ent branches of Friends come together to work and tell sto­ries. QUIP ses­sions strike a nice bal­ance between work and unstruc­tured time, it’s has its own nice cul­ture of friend­li­ness and coop­er­a­tion that are the real rea­son many of us go every year.

Con­tinue…