Benigno Sanchez-Eppler shares the ways Friends live out our testimonies in the world.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Author Archives ⇒ Martin Kelley
From concern to action in a few short months
July 1, 2015
A growing list of stories is suggesting that black churches in the South are being targeted for arson once again (although one of the more publicized cases seems to be lightning-related). This was a big concern in the mid-1990s, a time when a Quaker program stepped up to give Friends the chance to travel to the South to help rebuild. From a 1996 Friends Journal editorial:
Sometimes a news article touches the heart and moves people to reach out to one another in unexpected ways. So it was this winter when the Washington Post published a piece on the rash of fires that have destroyed black churches in the South in recent months… When Friend Harold B. Confer, executive director of Washington Quaker Workcamps, saw the article, he decided to do something about it. After a series of phone calls, he and two colleagues accepted an invitation to travel to western Alabama and see the fire damage for themselves. They were warmly received by the pastors and congregations of the three Greene County churches. Upon their return, they set to work on a plan.
I’m not sure whether Confer’s plan is the right template to follow this time, but it’s a great story because it shows the importance of having a strong grassroots Quaker ecosystem. I don’t believe the Washington Quaker Workcamps were ever a particularly well-funded project. But by 1996 they had been running for ten years and had built up credibility, a following, and the ability to cross cultural lines in the name of service. The smaller organizational size meant that a newspaper article could prompt a flurry of phone calls and visits and a fully-realized program opportunity in a remarkably short amount of time.
A first-hand account of the workcamps by Kim Roberts was published later than year, Rebuilding Churches in Rural Alabama: One Volunteer’s Experience. The D.C.-based workcamp program continues in modified form to this day as the William Penn Quaker Workcamps.
Update: another picture from 1996 Alabama, this time from one of my wife Julie’s old photo books. She’s second from the left at the bottom, part of the longer-stay contingent that Roberts mentions.
Storm clouds over Hammonton
June 24, 2015
The seasons’s first violent thunderstorm came through South Jersey and knocked out power and cell phone service for hundreds of thousands. Just how bad is it? News reports say dozens of Wawa convenience stores are closed. It might be two or three more days until our power is restored.
Banishing the demons of war plank by rotten plank
June 23, 2015
In National Geographic, Jane Braxton Little writes about the restoration of one of the most storied protest boats of the twentieth century:
The Golden Rule project is an improbable accomplishment by unlikely volunteers. Members of Veterans For Peace, they are a motley bunch that might have appalled the original crew, all conscientious Quakers. They smoke, drink and swear like the sailors, though most of them are not. Aging and perpetually strapped for money, the mostly retired men sought to banish their war-related demons as they ripped out rotten wood and replaced it plank by purpleheart plank.
Friends Journal ran an article by Jane, Restoring the Golden Rule, back in 2011 when the VFP volunteers first contemplated restoration, and a longer followup by Arnold (Skip) Oliver in 2013, The Golden Rule Shall Sail Again. Of course, the cool thing about working at a established magazine is that it was easy for me to dip into the archives and find and compile our 1958 coverage of the ship’s famous first voyage.
You ca follow more about the restoration work on the VFP Golden Rule website or check out pictures from the re-launch on their Facebook page.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: What This Cruel War Was Over
June 23, 2015
Coates lays out the sick and twisted heritage of a symbol:
The Confederate flag is directly tied to the Confederate cause, and the Confederate cause was white supremacy. This claim is not the result of revisionism. It does not require reading between the lines. It is the plain meaning of the words of those who bore the Confederate flag across history. These words must never be forgotten. Over the next few months the word “heritage” will be repeatedly invoked. It would be derelict to not examine the exact contents of that heritage.
As usual, Coates does a great job looking at the changing myths surrounding Southern White Supremacy. A rebellion that explicitly started as a defense of slavery shifted to more polite alternative myths over 150 years but it’s still really about racism and human bondage. The flag needs to come down.
This mythology of manners is adopted in lieu of the mythology of the Lost Cause. But it still has the great drawback of being rooted in a lie. The Confederate flag should not come down because it is offensive to African Americans. The Confederate flag should come down because it is embarrassing to all Americans.
Quakers and the ethics of fixed pricing
June 22, 2015
From a 1956 issue of the then-newly rebranded Friends Journal, an explanation of the ethics behind providing a fixed price for goods:
Whether the early Quakers were consciously trying to start a social movement or not is a moot point. Most likely they were not. They were merely seeking to give consistent expression to their belief in the equality of all men as spiritual sons of God. The Quaker custom of marking a fixed price on merchandise so that all men would pay the same price is another case in point. Most probably Friends did this simply because they wanted to be fair to all who frequented their shops and give the sharp bargainer no advantage at the expense of his less skilled brother. It is unlikely that many Quakers adopted fixed prices in the hope of forcing their system on a business world interested only in profit. That part was just coincidence, the coincidence being that Friends hit upon it because of their convictions; the system itself was a natural success.
— Bruce L Pearson, Feb 4 1956
Camp Acagisca
June 20, 2015
A two-night scouts camping trip with two of my kids to the county facilities at Camp Acagisca nears Mays Landing turned into a one night with one kid affair (my 11yo got way too mouthy when it came time to decide who was going to share a tent with dad and went home immediately; the 9yo ended up in a meltdown mid morning on the second day.)
Camp at dusk
A visitor stops hopping for a moment
Francis stays up to read Curious George stories by flashlight
Cooking eggs in a ziploc bag
Breakfast time
The group starts off on a hike down to Great Egg Harbor River
Cool growth on downed trees
A broken down out building from when this was a Girl Scouts camp. thr 2012 Mays Landing derecho came right through here and closed the camp for a long while.
River side
I photographed this mostly to have the emergency number handy if needed.
The road in and out.
And while I assumed the name was some sort of Lenape construction, it’s apparently an amalgam of Atlantic City Area Girl Scout Camp.
The PTSD of the suburban drone warrior
June 16, 2015
Something I’ve long wondered a lot about, As Stress Drives Off Drone Operators, Air Force Must Cut Flights.:
What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way that the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed.
I mention this toward the end of my review of The Burglary, the story of the 1971 antiwar activists, and it’s something I’ve been trying to pull from potential authors as we’ve put together an August Friends Journal issue on war. Much of the day-to-day mechanics of war has changed drastically in the past 40 years — at least for American soldiers.
We have stories like this one from the NYTimes: drone operators in suburban U.S. campuses killing people on the other side of the planet. But soldiers in Baghdad have good cell phone coverage, watch Netflix, and live in air conditioned barracks. The rise of contractors means that most of the grunt work of war — fixing trucks, peeling potatoes — is done by nearly invisible non-soldiers who are living in these war zones. It must be nice to have creature comforts but I’d imagine it could make for new problems psychologically integrating a war zone with normalcy.