As a lover of maps, I’ve often be intrigued by the environs  of the Delaware River. As the tides go up and down, the timelessness of the river becomes a kind of gentle solace to the industrialization along its banks. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the islands which somehow remain in its course. I’ve camped at Pea Patch Island down by Delaware and found a surprising family connection in its convoluted ownership. But closer to my commute is Petty Island, sitting alongside the New Jersey mainland a short distance north of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Petty Island is owned by the Citgo oil company and until just a few months ago was still dotted with its oil tanks and a large marine cargo facility. Satellite views still show this twentieth century industry. But in a very long and oftentimes-uncertain process it’s due to become part of New Jersey natural lands and eventually to become a preserve. The public is generally still not allowed on the island but there are occasional trips and on this past Saturday I got to tour the island.

We were very lucky to have Bob Shinn as our tour guide. He’s a walking encyclopedia of the island and the state geopolitics and waves of names and commercial uses it’s been through. He literally wrote the entry on Petty Island in the Philadelphia Encyclopedia. Not surprisingly there’s a lot of Quakers in the early recorded history and the deed between the first Quaker owner and three Lenape representatives is intact in the Haverford College collections (this deed was also a major part of a talk by Lenape–settler history given by Jean Soderlund a few months ago at Rancocas Meeting (see also her book Lenape Country)).

The ever-changing, never-settled history of the island continues with its name. Wikipedia, Google Maps, and—most importantly—Bob Shinn call it “Petty Island,” while the guard shack, welcome sign, NJ Audubon Society, and New Jersey Natural Lands Trust adds the possessive to make it “Petty’s Island.” The latter is especially awkward-sounding to my ears, as South Jersey place names characteristically drop the apostrophes over time (for example, the river landing named after Captain George May is now the town of “Mays Landing.”)

Remnants of the industrialization remain: the massive three-story loading facility has been kept to become the bones of a future visitors center; the adjacent asphalt parking area has just been replanted as a meadow and is mostly a lot of rocks and short blades of grass (with some Fowler’s toads!). We were lucky enough to be the first public group to be there since this had all been cleared away.

Bonus: I didn’t realize till we were about to get in our cars that South Jersey Trails was also on the tour. He wrote it up too! If you look carefully, I’m in the background of one of the shots, and now that I’m looking I think that’s him in some of mine.

She points to a sad decline both in yearly meetings affiliated with Friends United Meeting and in those affiliated with Friends General Conference. A curiosity is that this decline is not seen in three of the four yearly meetings that are dual affiliated. These blended yearly meetings are going through various degrees of identity crisis and hand-wringing over their status and yet their own membership numbers are strong. Could it be that serious theological wrestling and complicated spiritual identities create healthier religious bodies than monocultural groupings?

The big news is in the south: “Hispanic Friends Churches” in Mexico and Central America are booming, with spillover in el Norte as workers move north to get jobs. There’s surprisingly little interaction between these newly-arrived Spanish-speaking Friends and the the old Main Line Quaker establishment (maybe not surprising really, but still sad). I’ll leave you with a challenge Margaret gives readers:

One question that often puzzles me is why so many Hispanic Friends
congregations are meeting in churches belonging to other denominations.
I would love to see established Friends meetings with their own
property sharing space with Hispanic Friends. It would be an
opportunity to share growth and challenges together.

And it is in the vein that I will pass along the latest poll by MS-NBC, that has found that 70% of American people think Hussein and 9/11 are linked. This is perhaps the biggest lie of my lifetime. I fear for the very soul of my nation, that so many of my fellow Americans would deny all evidence to allow themselves to go along with this myth. There has been no evidence of any connection. Most of the hijackers were Saudi nationals, opposed to the U.S.-backed ruling Saudi family. Al Qaeda is a group of religious fundamentalists trained in part with CIA money who have always been opposed to the secular socialist regime of Saddam Hussein. There’s no mystery who the hijackers were or why they chose the U.S. as their target. Conspiracy theories aren’t needed to explain the events of two years ago.

So why then do we believe Saddam blew up the World Trade Center towers? Maybe there are too many of us who love our lives of convenience, who love our big cars, our big homes, our opulent lifestyles and maybe we know that deep down our lifestyle is based on control of Middle East oil. Or perhaps Saddam Hussein has become the demon we pour all our worldly fears and guilt into, so that we think all the world’s troubles must come from him.

Whatever the reason, the results are a kind of mass hysteria. Seven our of ten Americans believe in a conspiracy theory so divorced from any evidence that history surely prepares to mock us. Every so often I’ll read of the outlandish conspiracy theories running through the Arab world—like the one that the planes were manned by Israelies and that all the Jews who worked in the towers were warned not to come to work—and I’ll wonder how a people could live in such a state of unreality. But then I see American’s myths: just as incredible, just as based on our own demons. We have based a war and a foreign policy on the boogie-men of our subconsciences. We have killed for our fears. What if we were to wake up to reality: could we still justify the war and occupation of Iraq with the imperiousness and surety that we’ve shown so far?