quakers rock

This post is ultimately about the "mass casualty event" in Iowa on Saturday night, and may not be the lightest thing you read.

In 1982 I accepted a job at Scattergood School, three miles east of West Branch, and loved it immediately. There was a small meeting house near the road, and a cemetery across the road from it; down the hill we could hear trucks shifting gears as they came around a curve. "Both Nixon and Hemingway had ancestors in this graveyard," someone told me. "That's why they had to make the interstate go around it. It could be the only curve in the interstate in the whole state."

During meetings, there would sometimes be a wood fire in the stove at the old meeting house, which, like most Quaker meeting houses, was austere. No pictures of Jesus, no decoration, just wooden pews, off-white walls, a nice fire, and the sound of trucks coming up around that curve. I think I said the obvious: we need a wall out here to deflect the sound. I wasn't the first to come up with that idea and they did put one in sometime between 1982 and now. But I actually liked the sound of trucks. I had been on the road for many years, camping by roadsides, and it kind of calmed me having traffic there in the silence while I waited and drew faith from my experience.

High school kids were in general difficult and still are, and it was a lively place. I was a cook and a dorm sponsor and helped on the farm. I cooked sometimes what they produced from ground pork and produce from their gardens. I was a lousy cop in the dorms. I helped build a pig barn. I was there alone one winter when it was 20 below. I became a Quaker in that meeting house.

The other night, I went to Iowa to have a cochlear implant surgery at the UI Hospitals in Iowa City. It was Monday, but we saw evidence of the "mass causualty event" in the ditches and shoulders on way through from Tipton to West Branch. I had read about it on the news. Because I was a passenger in the car, I was able to see Scattergood School on the right as we drove through: the prairie, though you can't see the ice-skating pond; the solar gym, whose pipes froze that winter; the soccer fields. but this was while we were seeing trucks and cars in the ditches along the side of the road.

Coming back, though, we had to stop for gas in West Branch, which we got at a Casey's; I'm not sure they had a Casey's in 1982. But when we got back on the interstate eastbound, it was slowed down. It may have been only a ten or fifteen minute delay and fortunately the roads themselves were in good condition. But now we came upon mangled trucks right up on the shoulder, trucks that had gone off the road and still had their blinkers on, more mangled cars, and we were right up close. Traffic crawled, not because of rubbernecking so much as because trucks with blinkers were right there partly on the shoulders; we had to drive between them.

It was called a "mass casualty event" because 40 people were injured, 20 cared for in the hospital which had to choose which to do first. More than 50 cars and trucks were involved over a six-mile stretch just east of West Branch - which is right where Scattergood is. If I'm not mistaken, people at Scattergood could have looked down and seen some of these accidents as they happened.

It's a very crowded road these days - some people take back roads from Iowa City to Davenport just to avoid it - but the back roads aren't easy, and wouldn't have been easy for us either even though we could have cut south in Iowa City. But because it's crowded, and fast, it's dangerous, and it's not the only part of. 80 that ices over quickly, before they can get salt on it, on a cold and snowy night. You can go from doing 70 on a normal road to doing 70 on ice very quickly and then things start happening, and it was a miracle nobody. died although they did have to remove one person from a car. Apparently it was while they were working on a crash in the westbound lane that things started crashing in the eastbound, and things ended up backed up for seven hours, as far back as Coralville to the west, and quite a ways to the east also.

Although seven hours on a cold (~0) day is no small change, it once took me seventeen hours to get across the state of Missouri in an ice storm, so I can imagine what people felt like. It's no fun and you're lucky if you have the gas and the time that you can basically just waste. People will have stories to tell. Scattergood people don't use that interstate, as the road with the meeting house on it doesn't have an exit ramp, and they can't even get on the interstate until West Branch itself. Their stories will be about what they saw and heard down beyond the wall that protects them from it.

It deeply upsets my sense of peace that I've gotten and maintained around my Quakerism. Some people write in and complain about irresponsible truckers, or people going too fast, or whatever or whoever they can blame. Blaming is pointless, though, even blaming the Quakers for protecting their graveyard and making them put a curve in 80. Blame the weather pattern that brings snow and ice right on that little curve only, throwing cars. and trucks into the ditch and into each other. Or blame the ancestors for dying and resting on that hill. I'm not blaming. I'm hearing the gears though, and wondering about the grade, about the exact geography, about what actually happened. The mangled trucks and cars by the road, two days later, with blinkers on or whatever, I'll keep that image too. It's like Scattergood has had that uneasy alliance with the interstate from the start, and it's not any less uneasy now. It's actually very scary, like losing your hearing altogether, which is also happening to me.

In some ways, it was like coming home. But so is deafness, in a way. That's another story, equally scary. At least I'm here to tell the tale.

I call it "Ambivalence about Self-Promotion" Day.
But I'm worse than most.
It was yesterday, Oct. 5

Tonight the topic of Lucretia Mott came up, and it stirred memories in me which I'll explain. For some reason, she really stirs people up.

There are several reasons. First was that she was a very strong speaker, so that virtually everything she said was memorable and seemed to cut through time to speak to us today. She was born into a New England seafaring family and they seemed to be intense by nature, whether they were whaling or traveling around the world. But she ended up in Philadelphia, heart of the civilized world at the time, being a champion of women's rights and other things.

Second was I think that the times she lived in were very intense. People wrestled with basic questions of human freedom and dignity. In short, she had many opportunities to use her clear strong voice for the power of good.

One year I did a play for the dozen or so kids in our southern Illinois meeting in Carbondale. I wrote up this play based on very basic research into her life, and I learned a lot, though much of it I've forgotten and had to remind myself by digging out the rtf which you too can have by following the links on this template, free, right here online. Anyway the play was a success in our small town (Carbondale) and we were invited to perform it up in St. Louis, two hours north. Not every kid could make it so there was some shifting around of parts, etc. But the St. Louis meeting was much bigger and several of the old-timers were history buffs. Boy did they get stirred up! They came and congratulated us and wanted to talk the fine points of history - they agreed with everything that was written (unlike the Bartram play), but it just stirred them up to see the Quakers' role in that part of our early history. The main actors and actresses of course were glorying in just remembering their lines and delivering them well. The parents of our meeting had heard most of these lines dozens of times in the course of practicing; I know that I myself had the whole play well memorized by that time. In fact we might have even said to the new kids (replacement actors) - if you can't remember the line, just look at us in the front row and we'll give it to you.

It was all worth it, because so many people were so excited to see history played out right on their stage, in the meeting house. That's my main memory of that St. Louis meeting.

Lucretia, you made a difference.

Six million people, mostly Jews but also homosexuals, gypsies, and just "enemies of the state." Enemies of the state of course could be defined as they wanted; in fact they probably maintained that Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals were by nature enemies of the state. like us who have TDS.

Nowadays, we meet Germans every once in a while and they're just like us except that they speak German. Most times they're reasonably liberal, smart, educated, generous, logical people. To be honest I have a problem looking at them and wondering about their ancestors, though I know I too have German ancestors. That is, I wonder how their ancestors could have let it happen the way it happened.

A guy takes power in the government. He sets up camps off where nobody's watching and controls access. He says he's just going to do this and not worry about due process or whether the victims have done anything wrong. He separates out people by race but also by perceived difference from the norm as if just being against the regime makes you different enough to send you off to the camps. They call the camps "work camps" but people die there. Sometimes that's all they do. Sometimes they push them into the ovens and the smoke goes wafting over the countryside, the ashes and odor of human flesh burned to nothing. Innocent people: women, children, old people, some young healthy people too. They didn't need a reason. They didn't wait to see if it cleared the courts. They just killed them

Meanwhile the people go on living their lives and in fact, the people we meet today are descended probably from those who just put their heads down, did their jobs, didn't say anything. Maybe they approved or maybe they didn't but they didn't do anything to prevent it. Or maybe they're like me, wondering what they could do short of ending up in prison themselves. You want to survive, and you want your kids to survive, and you don't want everyone to perish in some god-forsaken uprising or attempt to right the wrong. There will be no righting the wrong. It will play out all the way as racism, anger, fear and violence feed of themselves until there is nothing left. In the end people will look at us like we might look at Germans today: How did you let that happen? How are we to forgive that?

Much is said these days about the genocide. In general I avoid talking about it. It is a genocide, a whole race is being attacked, and successfully killed, and in general we Americans are not only funding it but also jumping all around justifying it as part of a war. I'll admit to some complicity here since I feel like those hostages are kin and anybody who takes hostages as an act of war can expect that war to go on until the very bitter end, and very bitter it will be indeed. But children are starving, people are starving, and whether they in fact voted for Hamas (the children certainly didn't) that pales in the face of pure hunger, starvation, and the boxing into fenced-in corners of the earth like life is just a cattle-car, a very hungry one. Do you kill? Do you watch killing? Do you mind standing here just paying for it, with every dollar, every minute, every child-death?

People will look at us forever, and wonder if we could have done something.

A new issue has come out oF a journal called FQA and you can view it here.

I have several things to say. First, I'm not sure where I got it, or found it, but it's the first time I've ever seen one of these. I didn't know there was an FQA (Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts), or that they had a newsletter. I'm happy to see it!

Here are some things I'd like to comment on. First, there has always been an uneasiness between Quakers and the arts, since early Quakers were a serious lot, and rejected singing and dancing, not to mention pop art or poetry. I've always been aware of this and therefore been somewhat circumspect with my art. Not all of mine is Quaker, really, very little of it, but I am a Quaker playwright and pop artist, and have been considering leaning more into the Quaker side of what I do.

Because of that, I was interested in both Jeanmarie Simpson's and Chuck Fager's defense of the democratic nature of kdp, which has allowed a voice like mine to produce as much as I have. I agree with them - or at least Jeanmarie, who said that you can be aware of all the bad things about Amazon and still appreciate the fact that it has made it possible for so many little people to have a voice in this world. Chuck gave us a bird's eye view of the terrible economics which usually haunts us self-publishers, and made me feel glad I'm not alone. No giving up the day job here.

Finally, just knowing another Quaker playwright (Jeanmarie) is huge. for me. I knew she performed in them but never knew she wrote any, and I am already reading the one I saw in the FQA. I would say generally that there are not a whole lot of Quaker playwrights around. That makes each one of us very important!

Much to read in this journal, and my hope is that I can dig up and find more.