I discovered early in life that I am an adrenaline junkie.  Going up against the Selective Service System as a draft resister was an early clue.  Then the years working in Neonatal Intensive Care, and especially the intense situations in the field when transporting critically ill babies from their local hospital back to Riley Hospital for Children proved the point beyond all doubt.

I “enjoyed” a different sort of exhilaration last evening, though I hesitate to tell stories like this for fear it will discourage people from seeking opportunities to reduce their use of cars.  I needed to get to the Interchurch Center for a meeting with local environmental activists to talk about climate mobilization and ALEC.

Although I had planned to ride my bicycle, the tire went flat within a few blocks of my apartment, so I took a city bus to 38th and Meridian (where the route turns left on the map below).  From there it was only 1.7 miles to Interchurch Center.  But within a couple of blocks of leaving the bus, it began to rain.  And then it began to really come down.  Thunder and lightning.  And then the wind began to blow so hard I had to lean way forward just to walk.  And the street began to fill with water, which passing cars threw up in the air, and onto me.

But I was walking past the Crown Hill Cemetery, which was full of trees and plants blooming, and it all looked so awesome in the curtains of rain.  It surprised me that I was enjoying myself so much.

Although I had worn a rain jacket, it wasn’t entirely waterproof, and I was completely soaked, and not sure what to do when I reached the meeting.  John Gibson, of Sustainable Indiana, who I had worked with for years on the Keystone Pledge of Resistance and Indiana Moral Mondays, let me wear his coat.

Then, just as the meeting was about to start, another local activist, Zander Gieryn, appeared, also soaking wet.  I assumed he rode his bicycle to the meeting.  And he was grinning, too–another adrenaline junkie!

I have always appreciated the numerous occasions when my environmentalist friends showed up riding their bicycles, including Jim Poyser and Ted Wolner (both Keystone Pledge of Resistance Action Leaders).

While I always try to avoid imposing on others because of my car-less decision, I was very grateful that John Gibson and Wayne Moss gave me a ride home after the meeting.

Mind maps are a visual tool to help organize how you think about a subject.  The are like an outline, but also show the relationships or connections between parts of the subject.  A number of (many free) mind mapping software applications are available.

Below are two mind maps.  The one on race I worked on a couple of years ago, around the time of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter.

The one about ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) I began yesterday, since this is a new focus of my social concerns and activism.  I’ll probably be writing quite a bit about ALEC in the coming days, partly because ALEC is holding a national convention in Indianapolis this summer.  As you may know, ALEC lawyers create corporation friendly legislation that conservative legislators introduce in state legislatures all across the United States, and is why all of these repressive laws are being passed.  Much more about this in the coming days.

What is the peace movement to make of Donald Trump’s position that the United States should get out of the world police/nation building business, reported in this article in The Nation:   Donald Trump Could Be the Military-Industrial Complex’s Worst Nightmare:   The Republican front-runner is against nation building. Imagine that.

In a Facebook post my friend Alvin Sangsuwangul wonders about the following scenario:

Imagine this:
1. It comes down to Clinton and Trump.
2. Trump spends the next 6 months pivoting to the center, like in the article below.
3. Trump frames Clinton as a part of the establishment (Dems and Reps) that wrecked the economy through trade and war, attracting some of the same angry white voters who have been drawn to Sander’s campaign many of which are independents.  Could this be enough for Trump to win?   If Democrats want to be pragmatic, perhaps they need to choose an “outsider” in Sanders to match up against Trump. Thoughts?

My response:  Its really hard for me to admit, but I might have to abstain if it comes to Clinton vs Trump. She is so pro war, and this Nation article is really fascinating. Plus I no longer consider myself a Democrat after the way the party has treated Bernie’s campaign. Trump’s rhetoric of hate is totally unacceptable, but I wonder if something like his approach isn’t the only thing that can disrupt the corrupt business as usual of our government.

All this makes Bernie’s campaign so much more important than ever.  The Democratic party should be aware of a probable big backlash against Clinton by many Bernie supporters, and what that would mean in the general election.

What could be more outrageous than creating an environment that allows private businesses to profit, hugely, from the process of incarceration?  Who could not know that would result in significant efforts on the part of the prison industry to encourage arresting us in order to maintain the quotas these contracts enforce, making us pay for prison cells that are empty?  Who could not know these companies would lobby against criminal justice reform efforts, and for stricter sentencing, instead?  Those who may have been mislead to believe this would save us money, can see the opposite is true, from this report and elsewhere.

The Justice Policy Institute just released its report on this scandal, titled Gaming the System:  How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote Ineffective Incarceration Policies.

Emeritus law professor Sheila Kennedy explains this very well in her blog today.

As described here, Friends in Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) have wanted to collect stories of Quakers and their lives, to preserve and to share.  The Quaker Story Project website categorized the stories so they could be searched by person, subject, etc.  This was based on putting the stories in an online SQL Server database.  Unfortunately, the visual presentation of the stories wasn’t great.

Now that I’ve had experience with WordPress and blogging with this website, I realized moving the stories to a blog would have many advantages.  The visual presentation of the stories and photos is so much better.  The WordPress blogs are mobile-friendly, that is they work well with cell phones, too.  And the stories can still be searched by person or topic.  And it can be made possible to allow people to leave comments about the stories.

And of course we are hoping more and more Friends will submit their stories to add to the collection.

The new Quaker Stories blog is here:  https://quakerstories.wordpress.com/

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Muriel Bivens Mary Mendenhall Owen Crosby Helen Fawcett Ernie Beth Wilson

Bear Creek Meetinghose

Bear Creek Meeting

Bear Creek Meeting

Midyear Meeting at Bear Creek

Bear Creek Meeting

My friend Derek Glass is too busy developing digital community tools like Sustainability Scout to do much writing, but he gave me permission to share the following from a recent email message.

This is how we make progress, one story at a time.

“I still have a drive to the north side everyday for work, which I grudgingly do. I’d love to find a way to get rid of that. Bike ride would take an hour and a half a day and the bus times didn’t really fit my work schedule, plus the bus doesn’t even go all the way to my work.

BlueIndy stops at 62nd street. I was actually just getting ready to sell my car before I got this job. I was working downtown and biked the last 2 years to work. I think I put on 1,000 miles on my car last year.”

Some new parts of Sustainability Scout are ready.  Sustainability Scout was created by Derek and Katie Glass, Glass Web Projects, to aggregate the blogs of organizations and people involved in sustainable efforts in Indiana.  This has become a digital community building tool, and some new features are available.

Although much of what I was writing about in my own blog last year when I got involved with Sustainability Scout was related to environmental concerns, and often about the Keystone Pledge of Resistance, much of the rest of my writing is usually about issues of social, racial, and economic injustices, and also about putting faith into action.  Derek and Katie have continued to support these writings, too.

Communication has changed significantly, with much less journalism in the mainstream press and mainstream news outlets controlled by corporations.  Social media has become one of the main sources of communication for many people.   We are all learning how to engage with these new tools, both as readers and authors.

One of the new parts of Sustainability Scout is an author’s page.  Mine is here.

The blog details page looks like this.

There is also a new EVENTS page, that aggregates the upcoming events for the organizations that contribute to Sustainability Scout.

Changes

These are difficult times for all of us.  All kinds of changes have occurred in my lifetime, all over the world.  I think we sometimes forget that the rate of change is accelerating.  We used to have more time to adjust, to carefully consider alternatives and make spiritually considered choices.

Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) had a significant history of dealing with the imprisonment of a number of members related to noncooperation with conscription when it was instituted in the early 1940s.  That involved a lot of effort to support the families.  The Scattergood Hostel was open for several years.  Iowa Friends were very involved with Scattergood Friends School, the American Friends Service Committee, and creating the Friends Committee on National Legislation.  Many members were actively working for peace and justice.

In 1970, when I arrived in Indiana to begin my adult life, the country was trying to adjust to the end of our involvement in the Vietnam War.  And the civil rights movement was reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King and other leaders, and then trying to decide what to do after the passage of the civil rights legislation.

Then things were relatively calm until the Gulf War in 1990, when we invaded a country that had not attacked us for the first time in our history.  And the endless war since, including the rise of terrorism and assassination by drones (as well as the deaths of so many bystanders).

But then for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, it is my sense that peace work among Quakers tended to be focused on the AFSC and FCNL and similar organizations.  And unfortunately seemed to tend toward more and more meetings, and financial support, but less involved action.

But in the background, at first unnoticed, and then ignored, was the developing environmental disaster. 

What I hope to have done with this brief history is honor the significant amount of peace and social justice work Friends have done.  But also to express my perception, which may be incorrect, that much less hands-on, personal engagement has been going on in most of our monthly meetings.

Grief

Liz Oppenheimer just offered her suggestion that grief was playing a large role in how I was feeling these days, and I think that is the truth.  I think photography is much to blame for this.  And not owning a car.  Because both forced me to slow down, and allowed me to begin to pay attention to the beauty around us all, all of the time.  And the more you become aware of what you are seeing, that you hadn’t seen before, ever more is revealed.  And that then teaches you to see even more.  It’s a vicious cycle (of beauty).  

I am definitely grieving for the dying earth.  And I think I paid attention to that earlier than many, and see its extent so clearly because I am a scientist, and I easily see CO2 in my mind.  And I can visualize what is going to be happening to all of the beauty that I have been so deeply sensitized to.

Economic System

I think many Friends do not acknowledge that the economic and political situation in the United States has made us oppressors.  And I realize that I am grieving here, as well.  The past several years becoming involved with the KI (Kheprw Institute) community has, like photography, taught me to see what I had not been able to see before.  These people have become my friends, and it really hurts me when I see how they are hurt.

Conclusion?

For those who don’t know, I recently wrote about my frustrations with Quakers.  This is an attempt to try to explain better what my concerns are, and to offer an apology for not explaining better.  I have the greatest respect for Iowa Friends, and I’m glad I was reminded to consider all the great work done in years past.  But I am also still frustrated that (1) Friends don’t seem to understand their new positions as oppressors and (2) haven’t had some of the experiences I’ve been able to learn from, even though they cause me grief.  Good grief? (Charlie Brown).

So the personal automobile concern makes even more sense when I see the grief I feel when I look at a car, and see the CO2, and the consequences of that, at least the ones we are fairly sure of.  The other reason I grieve is because every attempt to model the future of our climate has erred significantly by underestimating how quick and severe the changes would be.  What we are experiencing now was predicted, but not to happen for another 50 years at least.  But the car concern also drives my urgency.  I regret now that I didn’t try to draw more attention to the issue of personal automobiles over the years.  What I realize now is that I do not want to be sitting here 10 years from now, and still be wondering why more people aren’t doing something to get rid of their cars.

My problem is that my meeting is one of several rural meetings in Iowa, and that is definitely a situation where a personal automobile would be needed.  But we could still be looking into alternatives, like electric vehicles, shared vehicles, kind of a reverse farmers market where a truck of supplies made its rounds to the farms, etc.  Getting renewable energy for our meetinghouses.

But as great an urgency is how people of color are being treated.  So again my problem is that Iowa has very little diversity in the general population, so what can Iowans do?  Besides looking to help those who are of color, white people in general have to speak out against systemic racism, and police violence specifically.  My grief is knowing, from the tearful stories I hear, of how terrified parents of children of color are anytime they leave the house.  It is because white people have not raised their voices that the police killings continue.   Now I know the same fear for my new friends.  That is why every day is so precious, and we can’t let days and months and years slip away as children of color are killed in our streets by police.  I warn you that the depths of how bad all of this really is, is far worse than anything you might imagine.

Friends

As I see it, those of us who have in one way or another gotten directly involved with people and communities who are living with injustice now see and hear and feel and learn these things that you cannot learn academically.  And mainly we make friends, and then share their pain and joy.  We are building Beloved Communities.  I think all Friends, if they haven’t already, and many have, need to develop friendships with people of color.  Not the only way, but one way to do this is by using the AFSC Quaker Social Change Ministry (QSCM) program I’ve written a lot about, and that we will be talking about at Yearly Meeting.  I hope that Bear Creek meeting might consider using the QSCM model in a long distance way, the same way we do the long distance queries.  Some of us have been doing something similar as spiritual support for Liz (which usually ends up supporting me as well by proxy).

Bear Creek Meeting

Bear Creek meeting

Bear Creek Meetinghose

KI community discussion

Peaceful protest

Monteverde

Midyear Meeting at Bear Creek

Bear Creek Meeting