Pass the hummus, please, and by the way: are you a fed?

December 22, 2005
· Martin Kelley

It seems that every day brings new rev­e­la­tions from main­stream media about gov­ern­men­tal spy­ing on Americans. 

MS-NBC start­ed the ball rolling on the 14th when they informed us that the Pen­ta­gon had a data­base of “pro­test­ers includ­ing the Rag­ing Grannies and a dozen or so Quak­ers in Florida”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316. This must have prompt­ed the New York Times to pub­lish a sto­ry they had been sit­ting on for a year: the scoop that Bush had ordered the super-secret “Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency to start eves­drop­ping on Americans”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/politics/15cnd-program.html fol­low­ing the 9/11 ter­ror attacks. It’s rev­e­la­tion was an FBI agen­t’s email com­plain­ing about “rad­i­cal mil­i­tant librar­i­ans [who] kick us around”:http://www.ala.org/al_onlineTemplate.cfm?Section=alonline&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=111469. Two days lat­er we received the almost-humorous news that the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty was hard at work mon­i­tor­ing the “Mass­a­chu­set­t’s inter-library loan sys­tem “:http://​www​.south​coast​to​day​.com/​d​a​i​l​y​/12 [UPDATE: this has been “revealed to be a hoax”:http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12 – 05/12 – 24-05/a01lo719.htm by the stu­dent]. Try­ing to out­do the DHS in ridicu­lous, we learned on the 20th that “the FBI has been infil­trat­ing veg­an potlucks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/politics/20fbi.html. Today it turns out the “New York City Police Department”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/22/nyregion/22police.html has been doing its own exten­sive inves­ti­ga­tions into pro­test­ers. They even appar­ent­ly staged mock arrests in an attempt to incite vio­lence (their con­tri­bu­tion to the self-parody has been to send offi­cers under­cov­er on bicy­cle protests).

Are we sur­prised by all this? Well, not real­ly. The fears unleashed after 9/11 ignit­ed a firestorm of para­noia in the ranks of spy­dom. Non​vi​o​lence​.org got a call from the U.S. Secret Ser­vice when Osama bin Laden post­ed to the board that he want­ed to kill Pres­i­dent Bush (well, actu­al­ly we’re pret­ty cer­tain it was a acne-faced four­teen year old pro­cras­ti­nat­ing on his geom­e­try home­work). When I shot “shot pho­tos of a scuf­fle at a Biodemoc­ra­cy protest a few months ago”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/2005/06/biodemocracy_pr.php a Philadel­phia police detec­tive was in my office an hour lat­er want­i­ng to see it (the “melee” was harm­less except for a police­man with heart con­di­tions who took that moment to have a heart attack).

While some mon­i­tor­ing and pru­dence is indeed nec­es­sary, what ties togeth­er the string of sto­ries this week is the ran­dom­ness of the tar­gets. It’s as if the agen­cies had lost all sense of judge­ment. Any­one crit­i­cal of the war (or even main­stream cul­ture: wit­ness the veg­ans) was con­sid­ered a threat. All leads were inves­ti­gat­ed, no mat­ter how silly. 

While invad­ing Amer­i­can’s pri­va­cy is upset­ting and unwar­rant­ed, the great­est dan­ger is the sheer mass of irrel­e­vant infor­ma­tion that’s been col­lect­ed. What’s an agency to do with reams of data on bicy­cle rid­ers and Quak­ers? Who’s watch­ing the flight schools and fer­til­iz­er depots while Agent Nin­com­poop is trad­ing hum­mus recipes with the cute veg­an with the nosering?

Random updates

December 22, 2005
· Martin Kelley

Just a quick note to every­one that I haven’t post­ed more late­ly. It’s a busy time of the year. I’ve had my hands full keep­ing up with arti­cles and links to the “Chris­t­ian Peacemakers”:/quaker/cpt.
I’ve also been doing some free­lance sites. One is launched: “Quakersong.org”:www.quakersong.org, the new online home of Annie Pat­ter­son and Peter Blood of _Rise Up Singing_ fame. It’s just the start to what should soon be an inter­est­ing site.
Geek-wise I’ve been inter­est­ed in the Web 2.0 stuff (see “this Best Of list of sites”:http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005.htm, link cour­tesy “C Wess Daniels”:http://gatheringinlight.blogspot.com/). I’ve talked about some of this “back in June”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/i_dont_have_anything_to_say_either.php but it’s get­ting more excit­ing. In the Fall I was asked to sub­mit a pro­pos­al for redo­ing the web­site of a Quak­er con­fer­ence cen­ter near Philadel­phia and it was all Web 2.0‑centric – maybe too much so as I did­n’t get the job! I’ll post an edit­ed ver­sion of the pro­pos­al soon for the geeks out there. Some of the new tech stuff will under­gird a fab­u­lous new “Quakerfinder.org”:www.quakerfinder.org fea­ture that will allow iso­lat­ed Friends to con­nect to form new wor­ship groups (to launch soon) and even more is behind the dreams of a new “Quakerbooks.org”:www.quakerbooks.org site.
In the mean­time, I encour­age every­one to order “On Liv­ing with a Con­cern for Gospel Ministry”:http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/1 – 888305-38‑x, the new book by New Eng­land Year­ly Meet­ing’s Bri­an Dray­ton (it arrived from the print­ers yes­ter­day). It’s being billed as a mod­ern day ver­sion of “A Descrip­tion of the Qual­i­fi­ca­tions” and if it lives up the hype it should be an impor­tant book for the stir­rings of deep­en­ing faith­ful­ness we’ve been see­ing among Quak­ers late­ly. While you’re wait­ing for the book to arrive in your mail­box, check out Brook­lyn Rich’s “Test­ing Leadings”:http://brooklynquaker.blogspot.com/2005/12/testing-leadings-part‑1.html post.

It’s witness time

December 2, 2005
· Martin Kelley

Hi Quak­er­Ran­ter friends: I’ve been busy today cov­er­ing the Quak­er response to the Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­ers Teams hostages. Two sites with a lot of over­lap­ping content:

  • Quak­er Blog Watch page focused on the hostages
  • “Non​vi​o​lence​.org state­ment and list of responses

Both of these fea­ture a mix of main­stream news and Quak­er views on the sit­u­a­tion. I’ll keep them updat­ed. I’m not the only busy Friend: Chuck Fager and John Stephens have a site called Free the Cap­tives — check it out.

It’s always inter­est­ing to see the moments that I explict­ly iden­ti­fy as a Friend on Non​vi​o​lence​.org. As I saythere, it seems quite appro­pri­ate. We need to explain to the world why a Quak­er and three oth­er Chris­tians would need­less­ly put them­selves in such dan­ger. This is wit­ness time, Friends. The real deal. We’re all being test­ed. This is one of those times for which those end­less com­mit­tee meet­ings and boil­er­plate peace state­ments have pre­pared us.

It’s time to tell the world that we live in the pow­er that “takes away the occa­sion for war and over­comes our fear of death” (well, or at least mutes it enough that four brave souls would trav­el to dan­ger­ous lands to wit­ness our faith).

peace movement humanitarian among iraq abductees

November 28, 2005
· Martin Kelley

The UK “News Tele­graph is confirming”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/29/nirq29.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/11/29/ixnewstop.html what many of us in the peace move­ment have been wor­ry­ing about all day: that at least some of the four west­ern­ers abduct­ed in iraq over the week­end were mem­bers of the “Chris­t­ian peace­mak­ers Teams”:http://www.cpt.org/
bq. A British anti-war activist abduct­ed in iraq was inves­ti­gat­ing human rights abus­es with a group called the Chris­t­ian peace­mak­ers Team when he was held.
Nor­man Kem­ber, 74, the only publicly-named abductee, is a for­mer sec­re­tary of the Bap­tist peace Fel­low­ship in Eng­land and a board mem­ber of the Eng­lish Fel­low­ship of Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. He’s been an out­spo­ken oppo­nent of the war in iraq. In the “April/May 2005 edi­tion of FOR’s newsletter”:http://www.for.org.uk/plinks0405.pdf (pdf) he talked about chal­leng­ing him­self to do more:
bq. Now per­son­al­ly it has always wor­ried me that I am a ‘cheap’ peace­mak­er (by anal­o­gy with Bonhoeffer’s
con­cept of ‘cheap’ grace). Being a CO in Britain,talking, writ­ing, demon­strat­ing about peace is in no
way tak­ing risks like young ser­vice men in iraq. I look for excus­es why I should not become involved with
CPT or EAPPI. Per­haps the read­ers will sup­ply mewith­with some?
Here at Non​vi​o​lence​.org, I’m occas­sion­al­ly cha­tised for being more con­cerned about west­ern vic­tims of vio­lence (indeed, how many iraqis were abduct­ed or killed this week­end alone?). It’s a fair charge and an impor­tant reminder. But per­haps it is only human nature to wor­ry about those you know. I’ve prob­a­bly met Nor­man in pass­ing at one or anoth­er inter­na­tion­al peace gath­er­ing; I might well know the three uniden­ti­fied abductees. I sus­pect a peace move­ment vet­er­an like Kem­ber would be the first to tell me that paci­fists should­n’t sit con­tent­ed­ly in middle-class com­fy arm­chairs sim­ply sout­ing slo­gans or dash­ing off emails (Quak­er Johan Mau­r­er, wrote an “impas­sioned blog post about this just last week”:http://maurers.home.mindspring.com/2005/11/saturday-ps-nancys-questions.htm). Part of the rea­son folks put them­selves on the lines for orga­ni­za­tions like Chris­t­ian peace­mak­ers Teams is that they want to do their peace wit­ness among those fac­ing the vio­lence. When the vic­tims aren’t just “them, over there” but to “us, and our friends, over there” it becomes more real. This is what the fam­i­lies of the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary casu­al­ties have been telling us. Now, with Kem­ber and the three oth­ers miss­ing, our wor­ry is made more real. For bet­ter or worse, the peace move­ment is scan­ning the head­lines from iraq with even more wor­ry tonight.
Our prayers are with Kem­ber, as they are with all the miss­ing and all the vic­tims of this hor­ri­ble war.

Smoking gun: the oil companies did write America’s energy policy

November 16, 2005
· Martin Kelley

Short­ly after the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion took office, Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney held a series of secret meet­ings in the White House that have guid­ed Amer­i­ca’s ener­gy pol­i­cy over the last four years. The White House has refused repeat­ed requests for a list of par­tic­i­pants at the “task force” meet­ings. All we’ve known for sure is who was­n’t invit­ed: eniron­men­tal­ists and any­one else who might bring a per­spec­tive crit­i­cal of Amer­i­ca’s depen­dence on fos­sil fuels.
We’ve long sus­pect­ed that Cheney’s spe­cial guests were top oil com­pa­ny exec­u­tives and that these con­sul­tants large­ly wrote the ener­gy guide­lines that came out of the meet­ing. The pol­i­cy strong favor the eco­nom­ic inter­ests of “Big Oil” over envi­ron­men­tal or nation­al secu­ri­ty con­cerns. The oil com­pa­nies have repeat­ed­ly denied being at the meet­ings: Just last week, oil indus­try offi­cials from Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Cono­coPhillips tes­ti­fied at a joint hear­ing of the Sen­ate Ener­gy and Com­merce com­mit­tees that their employ­ees had been part of Cheney’s ener­gy task force.
Liar liar, pants on fire.
The Wash­ing­ton Post has obtained a White House doc­u­ment that exec­u­tives from Big Oil did indeed meet with the ener­gy task force in 2001. Inves­ti­ga­tions are in order. Sen­a­tor Frank Laut­en­berg of New Jer­sey said “The White House went to great lengths to keep these meet­ings secret, and now oil exec­u­tives may be lying to Con­gress about their role in the Cheney task force.” This issue is impor­tant not only to Wash­ing­ton Belt­way insid­ers but to all of us. Dis­as­ters like Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na and the ongo­ing quag­mire in iraq are fueled by Amer­i­can ener­gy needs. As long as we have Big Oil dic­tat­ing our ener­gy pol­i­cy we will con­tin­ue to have these wars and cli­mate tragedies. Peo­ple will die, lives will be ruined and we will all be taxed for our oil misadventures.

Confusing “Quaker Faith” for God and worshipping ourselves

November 9, 2005
· Martin Kelley

Some­times my Quak­er Ranter posts dry up for awhile. I con­sole myself that I’m doing enough giv­ing out the “dai­ly read­ing list of Quak­er posts”:/quaker, read­ing through my new old Quak­er book col­lec­tion (Samuel Bow­nas just vis­it­ed the “meet­ing I’m attend­ing most fre­quent­ly these days”:http://www.pym.org/pym_mms/middletownpa_cdq.php!) and work­ing my new “advance­ment and out­reach “:www​.FGC​quak​er​.org/ao job – oh, and of course there’s also “the family”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/martin_kelley/40269563/! But you could also just fol­low my train of thought by look­ing over my shoul­der at com­ments made at oth­er sites. Over the last few days the Quak­er blo­gos­phere has had a num­ber of inter­est­ing posts. Here’s a cobble-together of posts and com­ments that have spo­ken to me about the inher­ent Quak­er snare of con­fus­ing our “Quak­er faith” for God.
Over on Kwak­er­saur, David M “shares some renew­al queries for his year­ly meeting”:http://kwakersaur.blogspot.com/2005/11/consultation-and-renewal.html. “Nan­cy A”:http://nancysapology.blogspot.com detect­ed a “sense an over­all fatigue” in them and “Beppe”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/ agreed, ask­ing if the seemingly-simple answers to these sorts of queries require that we first have the much harder-to-come-by “under­stand­ing [of] who we are.”
One of the queries goes “What does our Quak­er faith ask us to DO?” _Eeeyyaa-aa-yaaaaawwwn_. My favorite Quak­er committee-meeting trick of late con­sists of replace all the “we”-like phras­es with _God_. How about “What does God ask us to DO?” (Just a quick tes­ti­mo­ny: I love David’s work and I val­ue his won­der­ful online min­istry. Any time he wants to come down to Philly to tend to our flock with talk of Quak­er renew­al, he’s wel­come!! I’m sure every­one on the Con­sul­ta­tion and Renew­al Work­ing Group is deep­er than the queries would indi­cate and sus­pect that this is an exam­ple of the Quak­er cor­po­rate dumbing-down ten­den­cy that’s prac­ti­cal­ly our modus operandi.)
All this ties into a great post from AJ Schwanz, “Can I Say I’m Emerg­ing If I Haven’t Emerged or Quak­er If I Haven’t Quaked?”:http://ajschwanz.com/index.php/2005/11/07/can-i-say-im-emerging-if-i-havent-emerged-or-quaker-if-i-havent-quaked/,. Here’s a taste:
bq. Part of me has thought of shed­ding my Quak­er pin. How can I use it?: have I ever quaked with the pow­er of God? Shed­ding my dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion label cer­tain­ly would sup­port the idea that “there’s real­ly only one church, but lots of meet­ing places.” Par­tic­u­lar­ly in this town where the Quak­er col­lege is per­ceived as pret­ty insu­lar, would I have dif­fer­ent inter­ac­tions with folks if I sim­ply said “I’m a fol­low­er of Christ” rather than a “Friend”? What would I miss out on? What would be gained?
Paul L implic­it­ly address­es the ques­tion of shed­ding the Quak­er pin in his “review of Pun­shon­’s Rea­sons for Hope”:http://showerofblessings.blogspot.com/2005/11/reasons-for-hope.html, where he asks if “Quak­ers have a unique niche to fill in the Chris­t­ian and broad­er social landscape.”
Are we Quak­er because it’s com­fort­able, because our friends are, because the build­ings are cool and the social hour cof­fee hot? Or the oppo­site: are we Friends because we real­ly liked “Bar­clay’s Apology”:http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/333004 but could­n’t care less for the messy­ness of flesh-and-blood reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty? Anoth­er Quak­er blog­ger recent­ly sent me a pri­vate email in which he con­fid­ed: “My main ques­tion of late to Quak­ers is: what is so remark­able about Quak­ers? I some­times have to be a pain-in-the-ass in order to ask these ques­tions.” That seems like both a good ques­tion and a impor­tant meet­ing role.
There’s some­thing about liv­ing both with­in a com­mu­ni­ty and out­side it. The real deal isn’t in any of our human insti­tu­tions, the­o­ries or notions yet it is through these that we live out our faith. Christ as tran­scen­dent every­thing­ness and Christ as a par­tic­u­lar guy in a par­tic­u­lar place speak­ing a par­tic­u­lar lan­guage and liv­ing a par­tic­u­lar life. The pull between the eter­nal and pecu­liar is the very essence of the human con­di­tion. The same voice that spoke to the prophets and apos­tles speaks to us today, if only we have ears to hear. How can we learn to lessen the vol­ume on our own self-kudos long enough to hear the divine whisperer?

Katrina bin Laden and Our Public Enemies

October 24, 2005
· Martin Kelley

We now know that while Osama bin Laden and Sad­dam Hus­sein did­n’t con­spire togeth­er, they did have one thing in com­mon: their pow­er was fund­ed by our depen­dence on their oil. But even as Sad­dam’s show tri­al begins, tele­vi­sions are watch­ing Amer­i­ca’s new nation­al secu­ri­ty ene­mies: Kat­ri­na and Wilma. Al Qaida’s 9/11 attacks and the Sad­dam Hus­sein’s dic­ta­tor­ship were “pow­ered by” oil indus­try for­tunes and short-sighted glob­al ener­gy poli­cies, the same poli­cies now bring­ing us glob­al warm­ing and mon­ster storms.
Before mak­ing land­fall in Mex­i­co’s Yucatan and pound­ing Flori­da, Hur­ri­cane Wilma was declared the most pow­er­ful Atlantic hur­ri­cane in his­to­ry. That we got to a W‑name itself is cause for con­cern: the first trop­i­cal storm of the year gets a name start­ing with “A” and so forth through the alpha­bet. This sum­mer has been the “most active hur­ri­cane season”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Atlantic_hurricane_season since record-keeping start­ed 150 years ago. We’ve seen so many storms that weath­er offi­cials have now run through the alpha­bet: mete­o­rol­o­gists are now hav­ing to track Trop­i­cal Storm (now Depres­sion) Alpha 350 miles north of the Bahamas. In 2004, “five dev­as­tat­ing hur­ri­canes ripped across Florida”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Atlantic_hurricane_season, each one com­ing so fast on the heels of the last that few of us could even name them a year lat­er. As I write, Wilma is pound­ing West­ern Flori­da, one of the fast-growing regions in the coun­try. And of course Kat­ri­na dev­ast­ed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast just two months ago.
Glob­al cli­mate change is here. After decades of polit­i­cal hem­ming and haw­ing, only the most slimy of oil indus­try apol­o­gists (and Pres­i­dents) could argue that glob­al warm­ing has­n’t arrived. We’ve built a nation­al cul­ture built on inef­fi­cient burn­ing of fos­sil fuels. Devel­op­ers put more and more peo­ple on unpro­tect­ed sand­bars built, main­tained and insured by tax dol­lars. Some­day is here and our weath­er is only going to be get­ting worse. We could be prepar­ing for the inevitable adjust­ments. We could be invest­ing in con­ser­va­tion, in renew­able ener­gies. We could change our tax codes to encour­age sus­tain­able hous­ing: not just get­ting new devel­op­ment off beach­es but also build­ing urban and semi-urban com­mu­ni­ties that reduce auto­mo­bile dependence.
Instead we spend bil­lions of dol­lars on our oil addic­tions. We’re now wait­ing for the “announce­ment of the 2,000th U.S. mil­i­tary casu­al­ty in iraq”:http://www.afsc.org/2000/. Admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials used Kat­ri­na to roll­back envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion reg­u­la­tions in Louisiana. The arc­tic ice cap is rapid­ly melt­ing away (the North Pole is now ice-free for part of the year) but oil indus­try offi­cials point to the good news that we will soon be able to put “year-round oil rigs in the ice-free seas there”:http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1010 – 07.htm.
How many Kat­ri­na bin Laden’s and Sad­dam Wilma’s does it take before we get the news.

Quaker Blog Watch by email

October 18, 2005
· Martin Kelley

It start­ed when I began book­mark­ing the more inter­est­ing Quak­er posts I ran across over the course of the day. That turned into the side­bar on the “Quak­er Ranter”:/martin home­page, which then turned into the “Quak­er Blog Watch”:/quaker page. Now, as an exper­i­ment, I’m mak­ing it avail­able as a dai­ly email:

Enter your Email: 

More info here: “Quak­er Blog Watch by email”:http://www.nonviolence.org/quaker/email/
I do rec­og­nize that this site has mut­li­ple fan bases. While I was on pater­ni­ty leave a col­league emailed me to ask when I would post more pic­tures of Baby Fran­cis. I looked and saw that it had only been ten hours since I had uploaded the last pic­ture to my Flickr account. Aaayy­ee!, the dan­ger of increas­ing expec­ta­tions! Well, you can now get a dai­ly email con­tain­ing any new pic­tures of “Baby Francis”:/francis or “Big Kid Theo”:/theo: go to either of their home­pages for the sign-up form (they share one sub­scrip­tion). One small step in self-indulgent par­ent­hood, ain’t tech­nol­o­gy great?