cites Posts

Warning: this is a blog post about blogging.

• Light and Silence Simon on early Friend's embarrassing ethusiasms
  George Fox spent a substantial part of his early career facing down blasphemy charges. Perhaps more important, later Quakers (including Fox, to some extent) played down some of the things Fox said that got him into this trouble in the first place.
  (tags: quaker.conservative quaker comment)
• But Wait Shelley on being under the weight of a concern
  Although most Friends now speak in a way that is virtually indistinguishable from that of their peers, there are still some telltale phrases, and "under the weight of a concern" is one of them.
  (tags: quaker quaker.clearness quaker.witness)
• Kirk W explains his eBible work
  I picked verses that seemed to me most relevant as stand-alone cites... A few I marked with the tag/topic "quakers" when I thought they were most germane to Quaker distinctives, e.g, hireling ministry, oaths, and manner of worship.
  (tags: quaker quaker.christianity)

In the bookstore today a customer called in and asked about "Let your lives speak," a phrase frequently attributed to George Fox (it's the source of a book title, "Lives that Speak"). While a quick Google search finds lots of pages where people say things like "as George Fox said, you should 'let your lives speak,'" no one actually gives details of when and where he said it. The phrase seems to sit only by itself, with no passages before or after it. A few sites claim it was part of his message on Firbank Fell but no one cites a source. Sitting on the same Palm Pilot as the Yardbirds MP3s is Fox's Journal (Jones edition) and a keyword search doesn't pick up "lives that speak" or "let your lives speak" anywhere. Smells fishy, like another one of those too-good-to-be-true Fox quotes. Can anyone document that it's real?

PS: I fly bright and early tomorrow morning for this year's Quakers Uniting in Publications meeting, in Oregon. I don't know what internet access I'll have so my apologies if new comments have to sit for a few days.

Rick Jahnkow argues in May's Nonviolent Activist that there's a Decreased Likelihood of Draft. There are many aging pacifists that have become obsessed lately with the idea that compulsory military service might be returning to the United States. For example, I've watched the leader of one annual anti-draft workshop predict the draft's imminent return year after year, in ever more excited terms and wondered what evidence this organizer has seen that I haven't.

Jahnkow watches this issue as much as anyone in his work for the San Diego-based Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft and he's been watching the hype build as he's become more skeptical:

Warnings about an impending draft have been circulating on the Internet for months now. Some are tying a possible draft to the election and predicting with bold certainty that conscription will be introduced in 2005... The energy that�s been generated on this topic has been both amazing and, I have to confess, somewhat seductive to anti-draft organizations like the one for which I work.

Most of the people I've seen get excited by a possible return of the draft were in their teens back in the Vietnam War era. Their organizing sometimes seems almost nostalgic for the issues of their youth. They're trying to save the current generation from having to go through the same trauma. But the older activists' anti-draft work is often patronistic and self-congratulatory, for it doesn't take into account the fact that younger Americans don't need saving.

The bottom line truth is that the Pentagon simply couldn't reinstate the draft. Jahnkow cites a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll that found that 88 percent of people 18-29 oppose a return of the draft. There would be mass mayhem if the draft returned. While some young men would surely obey, a huge percentage would actively defy it. Even if only 10% dramatically refused, the system would break down. This is a generation raised in a post-punk culture and many of its members aggressively question authority. They were raised by parents who lived through the sixties and saw widespread lies and abuse of power, including the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The media mythology around sixties-era radicalism has kept us from realizing that there's a baseline of everyday radicalism today that far overshadows much of what was going on thirty years ago. The Pentagon knows this better than the peace movement does.

It's not the only nostalgic protesting this generation is engaging in these days and I've compared revived organizing around phone war tax resistance to "recycling dead horses." I agree with Rick that today's teens and twenty-somethings have real issues which we need to address. He says it so well:

The latter point leads me to the second reason why I have some negative feelings about the current concern over the draft: Much of the anxiety is coming from people who are ignoring the more pressing problem of aggressive military recruiting, which, among other things, disproportionately affects non-affluent youths and people of color. In essence, there has been a draft for these individuals�a poverty draft�and yet it has drawn relatively little attention from antiwar activists. There is a race and class bias reflected in this that needs to be seriously considered and addressed by the general peace movement.

Here's the link to his article again

Related:

• Last November we published a provocative article by pacifist Johann Christoph Arnold arguing that A Military Draft Would be Good for Us and a personal response piece I wrote about how the pressures of a military draft can force an eighteen year old to really think hard about issues of war and peace.
• Nonviolence.org has guide to issues of military conscription and conscientious objection. We also watch issues of the peace movement, and tend to highlight generational issues a lot.
• The Urban Legend debunkers at Snopes.com have tracked and researched the draft fear emails going around. They don't think a draft is coming back and any time soon, citing many sources.