Like everyone, we quickly pieced together the horror happening in real time: second plane, jumpers, collapsed. I was publishing Nonviolence.org then, a peace portal, and felt I had to say something, anything, so I rushed to the public computer at the local library. There was a queue of worried patrons wanting to message loved ones. In a few moments I typed out some rushed words:

Today’s terrorist attacks are simply horrendous, thousands of innocents might well lose their lives. Most important now is to sit patiently, to pray and to not call for massive indiscriminant attacks that might only kill thousands more. Our character as a nation is being tested now. We must pray and heal and not respond in a hatred that will only fuel the cycle of war, global injustice

We know how that turned out. Three thousand dead in New York and Western Pennsylvania, followed by hundreds of thousands in Western Asia. Decades of wars in Afghanistan. A second war in Iraq prompted by the flimsiest and most unlikely of excuses. Today, after all the blood, those countries are hostile and unstable. Yet two of the countries co-responsible were U.S. allies, are still U.S. allies. The 9/11 attacks was planned and largely executed by Saudis; Osama bin Laden was finally found living out in the open in Pakistan in an upper class compound a short walk from the gates of the country’s military academy. I’m glad we didn’t invade Saudi Arabia and Pakistan but it makes one wonder what the other wars were meant to accomplish.

This week many people are gathering to remember 9/11, as they should. It was a horrific attack. It struck our sense of safety and fueled nightmares and tears. But when do we as U.S. citizens gather to think about how we reacted? When do we remember hundreds of thousands who have died since 9/11 in the name of retribution and a fearful revenge we’ve called freedom?

Princeton villagers and members of the Continental Congress beheld the arrival of an unusual delegation of somberly dressed men astride horses. They had come from Philadelphia to raise an issue that the Continental Congress did not wish to address: the plight of half a million American residents — one-fifth of the people — who had been listening to memorable words about inalienable rights and how America would usher in a new age of freedom and justice, but who were condemned along with their children to lifelong slavery. The four men carried a parchment titled “The Address of the People Called Quakers.”

The author, Gary Nash, has a book out about Walter Mifflin, one of the four, which Friends Journal reviewed this April.

As I recall, the transatlantic slave trade went into overdrive in the newly independent United States. If the Continental Congress has listened, the complexion and character and history of the U.S. would be far different.
 
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/moment-nassau-hall

That one finally becomes the thing he violently fights is a fact that Hitler understood, in 1933, when he said, “The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.” It would be a tragic thing indeed if we Americans were stripped of our freedom by a foreign and aggressive power; it is all the more tragic that we gradually and somewhat unknowingly give up our freedoms, one after another, in the pursuit of that force which we claim will guard our liberty.

— Bayard Rustin [Source]

Friends theology strips away all irrelevant social distinctions, giving us the potential for radical hospitality, but that requires us to neutralize elitist signals of all kinds with a hunger to taste heaven’s diversity here and now. If it takes a whole new conversion to give us the necessary freedom and emotional range in place of old class anxieties, so be it.

http://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/03/decline-and-persistence-part-two.html

Just the other day I realized that I felt more comfortable being a Friend since not attending Meeting on an ongoing basis. My ongoing “e‑relationships” via the blogosphere has helped me stay “connected”. Observe how pleased I responded to Liz’s recent post (the one that I quoted in the post before this one). It’s as if I’m starving for good fellowship of some kind or another.

There’s even more talk about internet-mediated discernment/fellowship in the “comments to his followup.

Given all this, I’m not sure if I’ve ever highlighted a “vision for an expanded Quaker Ranter site” that I put together for a “youth leadership” grant in Third Month:

I’ve been blessed to meet many of my [age] peers with a clear call to inspired ministry. Most of these Friends have since left the Society, frustrated both by monthly meetings and Quaker bodies that didn’t know what to do with a bold ministry and by a lack of mentoring eldership that could help season these young ministers and deepen their understanding of gospel order. I would like to put together an independent online publication… This would explicitly reach out across the different braches of Friends and even to various seeker movements like the so-called “Emergent Church Movement.”

As I’ve written I was selected for one of their fellowships (yea!!) but for an amount that was pointedly too low to actually fund much (huh??). There’s something in the air however. “Quaker Dharma” is asking similar questions and Russ Nelson’s “PlanetQuaker” is a sometimes-awkward automated answer (do its readers really want to see the ultrasounds?). I’m not sure any of these combo sites could actually work better than their constituent parts. I find myself uninterested in most group blogs, aggregators, and formal websites. The invididual voice is so important.

And don’t we already have a group project going with all the cross-reading and cross-linking we’re doing. Is that what Joe was talking about? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found some new interesting blogger and went to post a welcome in their comments only to have found that Joe or LizOpp had beaten me to it. (Some of us are to the point of reading each other’s minds. I think I could probably write a great Beppe or LizOpp post and vice-versa.) Is this impulse to formalize these relationships just a throwback to old ideas of publishing?

Maybe the web’s form of hyperlinking is actually superior to Old Media publishing. I love how I can put forward a strong vision of Quakerism without offending anyone–any put-off readers can hit the “back” button. And if a blog I read posts something I don’t agree with, I can simply choose not to comment. If life’s just too busy then I just miss a few weeks of posts. With my “Subjective Guide to Quaker Blogs” and my “On the Web” posts I highlight the bloggers I find particularly interesting, even when I’m not in perfect theological unity. I like that I can have discussions back and forth with Friends who I don’t exactly agree with.

I have nothing to announce, no clear plan forward and no money to do anything anyway. But I thought it’d be interesting to hear what others have been thinking along these lines.