organizers Posts

• Micah checks in on the recent youth gathering (via QuakerQuaker.org)
  As one of the organizers of this conference, it was a very different experience for me than if I had been solely a participant. I felt a strong sense of needing to ground the gathering, particularly the worship sessions, and worked with the pastoral care
  (tags: quaker quaker.youth)

The Batsto Village Halloween party wasn't quite so much fun this year: their website didn't mention that most activities ended part-way through the afternoon so that the organizers could sit in front of the old houses giving out candy. We arrived on the late side so no face painting or pony rides for the boys butterflies. We still had fun in the first really autumn day of the season and Batsto was looking more bucolic than ever. More pictures (including some of the cool gearing in the old Batsto gristmill) over on yesterday's Flickr page.

Right: rare video footage of a Genus Franciscus Butterfly in migration.

I was given permission to pass along this data from the FGC-sponsored Youth Ministry Consultation that took place Third Month. A number of goals and projects had been brainstormed beforehand. The thirty-or-so participants at the Consultation were each given ten stars, which they were asked to put next to the projects they thought should be pursued. Every star acted as a vote that there was one person interested in that topic. The stars were coded to indicate the age range of the voter: High-Schooler, Adult Young Friend (18-37 years old) and older Friends.

It's been five years since the instantly-famous world trade protests in Seattle invented a new sort of activism. Angry confrontations with police dominated the pictures coming from the protests. The protest marked the coming-out party of the Independent Media movement, both both brought together and reported on the protests.

In the Seattle Weekly, Geov Parrish asks Is This What Failure Looks Like?:

But it's one thing to shut down a high-level meeting for a day; it's quite another to get your priorities enacted as public policy. And so, in the half-decade since Seattle's groundbreaking protests, anti-globalization and fair-trade organizers in the United States have struggled to find ways to not simply create debate but win.

I've always respect Geov, who's been one of the rare pacifist organizers who's acted as a bridge between the gray-haired oldline peace groups and the younger Seattle-style activists. So it's kind of funny to see his thoughtful article described by Counterpunch this way. Read Charles Munson's critique, Seattle Weekly Trashes Anti-Globalization Movement.

The WTO protests were a landmark and radicalized a lot of new activists. But despite being 99% peaceful, they never shook the image of the black-clad anarchist spoiled brats throwing bricks through windows. Although I had friends who donned the black hankerchiefs, the black bloc always reminded me of the loser high school kids who turn over dumpsters behind the 7-11; the high political rhetoric seemed secondary to the joy of being "bad." It was look-at-me! activism, which is fun and occassionally useful, but not the stuff to create fundamental social change.

I participated in a few post-Seattle events: the anti World Bank protests in Washington DC and the Republican National Convention protests in my hometown of Philadelphia, serving as an Indymedia worker for both. I witnessed wonderful creativity, I marveled at the instant community of the Indymedia Centers, I was fasincated by the cell-phone/internet organizing.

But there was also this kind of nagging sense that we were trying to recreate the mythical "Seattle." It was as if we were all derivative rock bands trying to jump on the bandwagon of a breakthrough success: the Nivana clones hoping to recatch the magic. It was hard to shake the feeling we were play acting ourselves sometimes.

It's good to honestly reflect on the protests now. We need to see what worked and what didn't. The fervor and organizing strategies changed activism and will continue to shape how we see social-change organizing. The world is better for what went down in Seattle five years ago, and so is North American polticial organizing. But let's stop idolizing what happened there and let's see what we can learn. For we've barely begun the work.

Over on the Picket Line, more questioning of peace movement sacred cows. PL questions whether the Peace Tax Fund is just an accounting trick and follows up looking at the benefits enumerated by its organizers.

He sums it up with this great analogy: "It would be as if the government told conscientious objectors that they had to take up arms and shoot at the enemy just like everybody else, but that they didn't have to take credit for their kills if they didn't want to."

It's interesting reading this along with the article questioning the peace movement's misplaced excitement about a possible military draft.

In late January 2004, I went to a gathering on "Quaker Faith and Practice: The Witness of Our Lives and Words," co-sponsored by the Christian Friends Conference and the New Foundation Fellowship. Here are some thoughts about the meeting.

An visioning essay I wrote in March of 1997, for Friends Institute, the Philadelphia - area young adult Friends group I was very involved with at the time. I repost it now because many of these same issues continually come up in Quaker groups. See the bottom for the story on this essay, including the controversy it kicked up.

For more context about my ongoing concerns with generation issues in Quakerism, see my Young Adult Friends page.