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The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote an article on Julie's traditionalist Catholic church this week and even produced a video that gives you a feel of the worship. Because of the two little ones we try to alternate between her church and Friends meeting on First Day mornings (though my crazy work schedule over the past few months have precluded even this). I'm in no danger of becoming the "Catholic Ranter" anytime soon (sorry Julie!) but I do appreciate the reverence and sense of purpose which Mater Ecclessians bring to worship and even I have culture shock when I go to a norvus ordo mass these days. Commentary on the Inquirer piece courtesy Father Zuhlsdorf. That blog and the Closed Cafeteria are favorites around here. Here's a few pictures of us at the church following baptisms.

PS: I wish the Catholic Church as a whole were more open-minded when it comes to LGBT issues. That said, the sermons on the issue I've heard at Mater Ecclesiae have gone out of their way to emphasize charity. That said, I've occasionally heard some under the breath comments by parishioners that weren't so charitable. Yet another reason to stay the Quaker Ranter.

PPS: And please, no comments on why the Catholic church is wrong, why Julie left Friends, why the Tridentine Mass is a step backwards, yada yada yada. I'm posting these links to share something of our lives. Thanks.

There's some interesting follow-up on the Cindy Sheehan "resignation" (see yesterday's post). One fellow I corresponded with years ago gave a donation then sent an email urging us not to fall into despair. It's hard.

Go beyond Democratic Party fronts like MoveOne and you'll find the most of the peace movement is a ridiculously shoestring operation. Nonviolence.org's four month "ChipIn" fundraising campaign raised $50 per month but the sacrifice isn't just short-term--just try applying for a mainstream job with a resume chock full of social change work!

Michael Westmoreland-White over on the Levellers blog talks about keeping going through the despair:

This is a cautionary tale for the rest of us, including myself. Outrage, righteous indignation, anger, public grief, are all valid reactions to war and human rights abuses, but they will get us only so far. They may strain marriages and family life. They may lead to speech and action that is not in the spirit of nonviolence and active peacemaking. And, since imperialist militarism is a system (biblically speaking, a Power), it will resist change for the good. Work for justice and peace over the long haul requires spiritual discipline, requires deep roots in a spirituality of nonviolence, including cultivating the virtue of patience.

Michael's answer is specifically Christian but I think his advice to step back and attend to the roots of our activism is wise despite one's motivations.

Sheehan's retirement didn't stop her from talking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now this morning. She talks about cash-starved peace activists and contrasts them with the tens of millions presidential candidates are raising, most of which will go to big media TV networks for ads. Sheehan says we need more than just an antiwar movement:

Like, ending the Vietnam War was major, but people left the movement. It was an antiwar movement. They didn’t stay committed to true and lasting peace. And that’s what we really have to do.

More Cindy Sheehan reading across the blogosphere available via Google and Technorati.

And for those looking for a little good news check out the brand new site for the Global Network for Nonviolence. I designed it for them as part of my freelance design work but it's been a joy and a lot of fun to be working more closely with a good group of international activists again. Their nonviolence links page includes sites for some really committed grassroots peacemakers. This long-term peace work may not give us headlines in the New York Times but it's touched millions over the years. If humanity is ever going to grow into the kind of culture of peace Sheehan dreams of then we'll need a lot more wonderful projects like these.

Strangely enough, the Philadelphia Inquirer has published a front-page article on leadership in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Friends frustrate some of their flock, Quakers bogged down by process, two leaders say. To me it comes off as an extended whine from the former PhYM General Secretary Thomas Jeavons. His critiques around Philadelphia Quaker culture are well-made (and well known among those who have seen his much-forwarded emails) but he doesn't seem as insightful about his own failings as a leader, primarily his inability to forge consensus and build trust. He frequently came off as too ready to bypass rightly-ordered decision-making processes in the name of strong leadership. The more this happened, the more distrust the body felt toward him and the more intractible and politicized the situation became. He was the wrong leader for the wrong time. How is this worthy of the front-page newspaper status?

An early edition of "Nonviolence Web Upfront," which debuted December 29, 1997.

I started Nonviolence.org in late 1995 as a place to publicize the work of the US peace movement which was not getting out to a wide (or a young) audience. I built and maintained the websites of a few dozen hosted groups (including the War Resisters League, Fellowship of Reconciliation and Pax Christi USA) but I quickly realized that the Nonviolence.org homepage itself could be used for more than just as a place to put links to member groups. I realized I could highlight the articles I thought should get more publicity, whether on or off the Nonviolence.org domain. The homepage adapted into what is now a recognizable blog format on December 29, 1997 when I re-named the homepage "Nonviolence Web Upfront" and started posting links to interesting articles from Nonviolence.org member groups. In response to a comment the other day I wondered how that fit in with the evolution of blogging. I was shocked to learn from Wikipedia's article on weblog that the first use of the term occured on December 29, 1997--yes, the same day!

I think is less a coincidence than a confirmation that many of us were trying to figure out a format for sharing the web with others. Below is an excerpt from the email announcement for "Nonviolence Web Upfront." The reliable Archive.org has index of Upfront's second week, whose feature was a guest piece by John Steitz, Is the Nonviolence Web a Movement Half-Way House that sounds eerily similar to recent discussions on Quaker Ranter.

Today's Washington Post has an article claiming that the Army is "bungling recruitment. The continuing stream of combat deaths in iraq make the armed forces a less attractive option than they once were:

Nearly every day, anywhere from one to several U.S. soldiers or Marines die in iraq, and even more are wounded. The news doesn't always make the front pages anymore, but the casualty rate has apparently registered deeply in the consciousness of young Americans and their families. The result is a dangerous decline in new enlistments that is depleting U.S. military resources and weakening our capacity to face additional conflicts or threats from abroad.

In many ways, it's great that the army is becoming unpopular again! Some pacifists extrapolate this to say the draft will have to be reinstated soon but I think this is unlikely, as the Army and Congress know the outcry and mass protests that would erupt. The short term effect will be sloppier procedures on the ground, as too few soldiers stretched too thin take shortcuts that inevitably result in unnecessary deaths and more atrocities in the prisons.

Is there a way the peace movement could take advantage of the growing unease and worry about life in the military to open conversations and get our message out to a wider audience?

The Baby Theo blog got a mention in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, It's almost as good as being there, by Kathy Boccella. They missed out on a huge ratings bonanza by not picking Theo for their pictures. Stranger was that two interviews produced only one off-topic substantive line: "Martin Kelly [sic] experienced the worst of it when someone threatened his infant son on his Baby Theo Web page."

Above: Theo on learning he wasn't going to be the featured baby photo in the Inquirer piece... Real photo caption: This weekend Julie Theo and I took a mini vacation to the Pennsylvania coal regions (can you say "geeks"?) One of the stops was the beautifully restored Tamaqua train station where Theo's great great grandfather, the first Martin John Kelley, worked as a Reading Railroad conductor. We woke the little guy up from a car nap to see the station and snap this picture, cruel parents that we are.

The Baby Theo site has been a lot of fun and it's had great comments and emails of support. It's really a shame that the article only used it to strike that tired old refrain about the possible danger lurking on the internet.

The threat had nothing to do with Theo or with the baby blog. I've run a prominent antiwar website through two wars now, and in the nine years of its existence I've amassed quite a collection of abusive emails. I try not to take them too seriously: most come from soldiers or from the families of soliders, people desparately afraid of the future and surely torn by the acts they're being asked to commit. The internet provides the psychological distance for otherwise good people to demonize the "commie Saddam-loving peacenik coward." You could get mad at a President that actively misleads the country into war but it's easier to turn your anger on some schmuck who runs an antiwar website in his spare time. Sending threatening emails is itself cowardly and anti-democratic, of course, and as I've written on Nonviolence.org, it's terribly inappropriate for "military personnel to use government computers to threaten the free speech" of a dissenting American citizen. But it happens. And because it happens and because South Jersey has its share of pro-war hotheads, you won't see our specific town mentioned anywhere on the site. When I asked the Inquirer reporter if they could not mention our town, she asked why, which led to the threatening emails, which led to the question whether Theo specifically had been threatened.

And yes, there was a retired Lieutenant Colonel who sent a particularly creepy set of emails (more on him below). The first email didn't mention Theo. It was just one of those everyday emails wishing that my family would be gang-raped, tortured and executed in front of me. I usually ignore these but responded to him, upon which I received a second email explaining that he was making a point with his threat ("You, your organization and others like you represent the 'flabby soft white underbelly' of our Nation. This is the tissue of an animal that is the target of predators." Etc., etc., blah, blah, blah). This time he searched the Nonviolence.org site more thoroughly and specifically mentioned Theo in his what-if scenario. This was one email out of the thousands I receive every month. It was an inappropriate rhetorical argument against a political/religious stance I've taken as a public witness. It was not a credible threat to my son.

Still, precaution is in order. I mentioned this story to the Inquirer reporter only to explain why I didn't want the town listed. When I talked about the blog, I talked about old friends and distant relatives keeping up with us and sharing our joys via the website. I talked about how the act of putting together entries helped Julie & I see Theo's changes. I told Kathy how it was fun that friends who we had met via the internet were able to see something beyond the Quaker essays or political essays. None of that made it through to the article, which is a shame. A request to not publish our home town became a sensationalist cautionary tale that is now being repeated as a reason not to blog. How stupid.

The cautionary lesson is only applicable for those who both run a baby blog and a heavily used political website. When your website tops 50,000 visitors a day, you might want to switch to a P.O. Box. End of lesson.

Fortunately with the internet we don't have to rely on the filter of a mainstream press reporters. Visitors from the Inquirer article have been looking around the site and presumably seeing it's not all about internet dangers. Since the Inquirer article went up I've had twice as many visits from Google as I have from Philly.com. Viva the web!

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More:

For those interested, the freaky retired Lieutenant Colonel is the chief executive officer of a private aviation company based in Florida, with contracts in three African nations that just happen to be of particular interest to the U.S. State Department. Although the company is named after him, his full name has been carefully excised from his website. I don't suspect that he really is retired from U.S.-sponsored military service, if you know what I mean... Here's your tax dollars at work.

A few newspaper websites have republished up the Inky article and two blogging news sites have picked up on it:

• Yet Another Baby Blogging story uncovers danger - but it's not true ran in BloggingBaby.com: "When someone threatened his son on his Baby Theo Web page, he took the site down; but left up a pic on his home page. Well, that is, according to the article, which somehow managed to not check its facts (maybe, ummm--go to the link you included in your article?) and discover that, in fact, Baby Theo's page is alive and well. We're glad, Theo's a cutie."

• Baby bloggers ran in Netfamilynews. "The $64,000 question(s) is: Is this a shift of thinking and behavior or, basically, a mistake?.. Martin Kelly, whose baby was threatened by someone who visited his baby page, would lean toward the mistake side of the question." (No I wouldn't, as I explained to the webmaster later)

When I posted the Slate article last night I missed that the New York Times' From the Editor piece had been published

Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into iraq... It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.

In the last year we've become accustomed to reading newspaper apologies. The medium itself is shifting, in response to 24-hour cable news programs and innumerable news websites. The old newspapers themselves are less about detail and more about context. There's more of an editorial voice coming in and more attention to good writing and story-telling. Papers like the Times are becoming daily magazines. The pressures for good stories has led editors to overlook lapses in the work of star reporters like Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. This new era of apologies is a correction of sorts, and the major papers' reaffirmation of their strict accuracy standards perhaps signals a commitment to hold the line of newspaper transformation right here.

Perhaps. "From the Editors" doesn't feel honest to me. It's full of details and reads more like an combined "Corrections" piece for the last two years. By nitpicking on each error with such diligence, the message is that the mistakes have been one of details. "From the Editors" talk about the "critics of our coverage" in a way that makes it clear that this piece is a defense, not a mea culpa. The editor's unstated message is that anyone who would critique them is overly obsessed with details.

But we're not talking details. Most Americans have had their post-9/11 worldviews shaped by news organizations that had decided that critical thinking was unpatriotic. The Times coverage has actually been better than most. Watch the unsubstantiated hyped-up garbage that runs of most local TV news and you'll see scare-mongering continuing every night. Even as Americans slowly rethink this war and even as President Bush's polls drop, we can't undo that two major wars have been fought with faulty information.

The mainstream media still aren't asking the right questions, following up the details, asking critical questions or putting the news into larger context. At this point, the Bush Administration's national security credibility has been used up. There were no weapons of mass destruction in iraq, Saddam Hussein had no hand in 9/11, opposition iraqi "leader" (and Bush favorite) Ahmed Chalabi is not a trustworthy fellow. Add to that the mess that is the Afghanistan and iraq occupations. The U.S news media shouldn't publish anything coming from the offices of the Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, or Attorney General Ashcroft without collaborating evidence from at least three independent sources. The national news media needs more of apology than this if it's going to mollify the critics.

Update May 28:

Today's column by the New York Times' Paul Krugman, To Tell the Truth, also talks about how the news media protected President Bush and his administration's war claims from any serious questioning:

People who get their news by skimming the front page, or by watching TV, must be feeling confused by the sudden change in Mr. Bush's character. For more than two years after 9/11, he was a straight shooter, all moral clarity and righteousness... But now those people hear about a president who won't tell a straight story about why he took us to war in iraq or how that war is going, who can't admit to and learn from mistakes, and who won't hold himself or anyone else accountable. What happened?