I don’t want to exaggerate the ease of the transition. I remember an elderly Friend who opposed a proposal to hold business meetings at another time than the Sunday school hour. She argued — and I think this is nearly verbatim — “We tried that back in 1937 and it didn’t work.” As much as I wanted to laugh out loud, I had to acknowledge that her entire history at the meeting exemplified selfless service.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2019/03/trustworthy-part-four-churches-choices.html

“We wanted our guests to have something to do as they arrived [while] we took pictures with our families, so we planned a kitten hour,” Colleen told POPSUGAR. “We did a cocktail hour with cocktails named after our cats for the reception, but the Quaker meeting house we used for the ceremony doesn’t allow alcohol on premises. I wanted a wedding falcon, but Iz vetoed that, and so we compromised on kittens.”

https://www.popsugar.com/moms/Couple-Has-Kitten-Hour-Wedding-45498151/amp

I just came back from what was billed as a kind of hearing/information meeting on New Jersey Transit’s planned shutdown of the Atlantic City Line. At least two of us had taken this seriously enough that we had written 500-word statements (here’s mine) but as soon as I walked into the Atlantic City rail station this morning at 8am, I realized that this was just a pro-forma, disorganized PR appearance.

The chief executive of New Jersey Transit, Kevin Corbett ¹, was there telling us the same list of excuses for the shutdown they’ve been telling us, namely, that this is about Positive Train Control (PTC) testing ². At least I think he was. NJT apparently doesn’t believe in microphones. I squeezed as closely as I could in the amorphous crowd of maybe 100 passengers who had turned up but I still could only make out a few words. Nearest Corbett were video cameras whose spotlights lit up his face. Maybe I can watch the news tonight and hear the meeting that I drove forty minutes to attend³.

I did hear repeated invoking of “PTC” but no of those words were admissions or mea culpas about the long-simmering labor problems that have led to train crew shortages. Because NJ Transit’s management have been behind targets for training new crews, and because engineers have been leaving for better-paying jobs on Amtrak and Metro North, there aren’t enough crews to run all of its lines and also do PTC testing. The easiest fix to the labor shortage is to just shut down the least politically connected train line and redeploy its crews to NYC-bound trains. We’re told this is a temporary fix but what if the management problems hiring, training, and retaining crews continues to bottom out?

After half an hour of this, Transit police found portable line markers so that passengers could line up to talk to Corbett. There were many passengers I recognized from my 15 years of commuting this line and I stood trying to hear them but again, to no avail. It was clear he was just giving the line.

Nearby was a table with schedules. I was pretty unhappy but I asked them a specific question ⁴. At least the Transit employee said she didn’t know and would look into it. She even wrote “Farley” on a pad of paper. I guess my trip wasn’t totally wasted.

If you’re a South Jersey local affected by all this, there’s a petition to sign. My friend Joseph (bicycleriiights on Twitter) has also done a great job writing about the possibilities of visionary South Jersey transit reform. Update: Also, NoreasterNick did a much better job getting to the front of the line and challenging Corbett. His video is great.

Singing along with a hymn does not pay rent. Sitting in Silent Worship revitalizes your soul and connection to the Light. However, it does not lessen the burden of needing to eat. The question we must ask ourselves as people of faith is what can we do in order to bring these poor (literally) people back to church. From my perspective as a Hicksite Friend the answer is simple, to turn to the Quaker tradition of activism.

Longtime readers will know I struggle too with how Friends can those who don’t have the luxury of Sunday morning free time. I wrote about this in a December 2012 article in Friends Journal (the only feature I’ve written since becoming senior editor). I was looking back to a 11-month period in which I had worked the night shift in my local supermarket. I’m always glad to see a new Quaker blog and this one is promising.

https://quakerreturns.blogspot.com/2018/03/your-hand-in-front-of-your-face.html

One Year Ago: November 2016

A year ago the shock to the system was Trump’s election. One reaction of mine was a promise to blog more; I set up the system but I’m still not as frictionless about it as I’d like.

Waking Up to President Trump: We do not get to choose our era or the chal­lenges it throws at us. Only some­one with his­tor­i­cal amne­sia would say this is unprece­dent­ed in our his­to­ry. The enslave­ment of mil­lions and the geno­cide of mil­lions more are dark stains indeli­bly soaked into the very found­ing of the nation. But much will change, par­tic­u­lar­ly our naiv­i­ty and false opti­mism in an inevitable for­ward progress of our nation­al sto­ry.

Five Years Ago: November 2012

Five years ago I wrote about how I had been blogging for fifteen years. Do the math: it’s now 20 frigging years since I started blogging.

Fifteen Years of Blogging: I keep double-checking the math but it keeps adding up. In Novem­ber 1997 I added a fea­ture to my two-year-old peace web­site. I called this new enti­ty Non­vi­o­lence Web Upfront and updat­ed it week­ly with orig­i­nal fea­tures and curat­ed links to the best online paci­fist writ­ing. I wrote a ret­ro­spec­tive of the “ear­ly blog­ging days” in 2005 that talks about how it came about and gives some con­text about the proto-blogs hap­pen­ing back in 1997.

Ten Years Ago: November 2007

Freelancing and working the overnight shift at Shoprite, I wondered if my Quakerness was hopelessly useless to my new circumstances.

Who are we part one (just what pamphlet do I give the tattooed ex-con?): I love the fel­low who gave the mes­sage and I appre­ci­at­ed his min­istry. But the whole time I won­dered how this would sound to peo­ple I know now, like the friend­ly but hot-tempered Puer­to Rican ex-con less than a year out of a eight-year stint in fed­er­al prison, now work­ing two eight hour shifts at almost-minimum wage jobs and try­ing to stay out of trou­ble. How does the the­o­ry of our the­ol­o­gy fit into a code of con­duct that doesn’t start off assum­ing mid­dle class norms.

Twenty Years Ago: November 1997

Four years before 9/11, I was asking how we could break the cycle of terrorism.

How Come the U.S. Trains All the Terrorists?: It would seem a sim­ple case of U.S. mil­i­tarism com­ing home to roost, but it is not so sim­ple and it is not uncom­mon. Fol­low most trails of ter­ror­ism and you’ll find Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment fund­ing some­where in the recent past.

Trump’s tweet came less than half an hour after the Chicago Tribune posted a few short quotes from the Boeing CEO saying they were concerned about the implications of trade with China under a Trump Administration. It was relatively tame stuff and of course a multinational with billions of dollars in China is going to be concerned. About a quarter of their aircrafts are built for the Chinese market.

But follow not the logic but the effect: if you criticize this president in public he will destroy your shareholder value. Boeing lost half a billion dollars in value following Trump’s 140 characters. Every CEO in America will now have to think twice before speaking to the press. It would be fiscally irresponsible to do otherwise. A few quotes in a paper isn’t worth that amount of shareholder value.

Free speech isn’t just court cases or a few lines in the Constitution. Even the CEOs of the largest corporations in America need to watch their tongues. Silencing has begun.

For workers like Mr. Roell, 36, who started at Carrier just weeks after receiving his high school diploma and never returned to school, the problem is not a shortage of jobs in the area. Instead, it is a drought of jobs that pay anywhere near the $23.83 an hour he makes at Carrier, let alone enough to give him a toehold in the middle class

Great stories and good reporting.

Can Trump Save Their Jobs? They’re Counting on It (Published 2016)

Employees of a Carrier plant that is scheduled to move to Mexico in 2019 say they expect the…

www.nytimes.com

• The completely unnecessary commando-style dive-and-roll that introduces Corporal Eric Casebolt. Some reports describe it as a trip but to me it looks like he’s playing a Hollywood action hero stunt double. Has he just been watching too many of the police videos he’s been collecting on YouTube?
• That none of the other officers saw his derring-do and said “yo Eric, stand down.” Is this something cops just don’t do? And if not, why not? We all know what it’s like to be hopped up on too much adrenaline. I know people do weird stuff when their reptilian brain fight-or-flight mechanism cuts in. It seems that officers should be on the lookout for just this sort of overreaction and have some sort of safe word to tell one another to take a chill.
• The videographer was a “invisible” white teenager. He walked nearby–and occasionally through–the action without being questioned. At one point Casebolt seems to purposefully step around him to put down his dark-skinned friends. The videographer told news reporters that he felt his whiteness made him invisible to Casebolt.

I never quite realized all the race politics behind the switch from public pools vs private pool clubs. I grew up in a Philly suburb with two public pools and very much remember the constant worry that Philadelphia kids might sneak in (“Philadelphia” was of course code for “black”). The township did have a historically African American neighborhood so the pools were racially integrated but I’m sure every dark-skinned township resident was asked to show town ID a lot more than I was. And it’s hard to think it was entirely coincidental that both public pools were located on the opposite ends of the township from the black neighborhood.

There are no public pools in the South Jersey town where I live. A satellite view picks out thirteen private pools on my block alone. Thirteen?!? There’s one private pool club across town. There’s a lot of casual racism around here, primarily directed at the mostly-Mexican farmworkers who double the town population every summer. If there was a town pool that reflected the demographics of the local Walmart parking lot on a Friday night in July, we’d have mini-riots I’m sure—which is almost surely why we don’t have a municipal pool and why wealthy families have poured millions of dollars into backyards.

(My family has joined the Elmer Swim Club, a pool located about half an hour away. While the majority of members are super nice and I haven’t heard any dodgy racial code phrases. The pool is diverse but is mostly white, reflecting the nearby population. That said, I’ve read enough Ta-Nehisi Coates to know we can rarely take white towns for granted. So.)