Reaching out/Holding on, A potpourri

I was going through a box of old photos with our great grandson, Aggie, Saturday when I came across a handful of small dark photos of four guys on a sofa and one guy standing all holding rifles. Another was a photo of legs ending in a pair of what looked like dirty bucks. And two photos of people milling around tables outdoors with a goat could be seen faintly in the foreground. 

These are remnants of my year at Lassen Junior College in Susanville, California in the late 1950s. A school at the time noted for its gun smithing and forestry courses. Saturdays I would gather with students from both. In the morning we would hunt jack rabbits and return to some of the guys’ house with four or five rabbits. We would skin them, gut them, toss them into a bathtub filled with vinegar and water to take the wildness out of them. But it really didn’t make much of a difference because by the time we got around to cooking them— usually fried— in the afternoon we had drunk so much cheap whiskey, anything would have tasted just fine.

I remember I had been given a miniature camera that used 8-mm film and was trying it out. At the time I developed my own film and printed photos. I wasn’t too good at first. I took pictures of our hunting parties, a celebration of the Sagebrush War during which gun smithing students stole and castrated the goat mascot of the forestry students.

Reading circles have been long- used by schools teachers and promote deeper understanding of text. We are leaving it up to each Gadfly participant to select a role for each session, then hand it off to another participant at the end of the session.

Here are ones we will use for our Gadfly Reading Circle on “Oppose and Propose” by Andrew Cornell beginning Monday, June 6. Participants should choose a role prior to our meeting. iSmply email me of your choice. First come, first served. See previous posts about the reading.

Discussion Facilitator (DF). Prepares a handful of questions and uses them to stimulate group conversations. The questions are thought-provoking, with no o only one answer. 

Graphic Illustrator (GI). Prepares a graphic that depicts the gist of the reading section and explains how it is related. The graphic may be drawn or found.

Context Tracer (CT). Prepares highlights of society, culture, news that was current during the time period covered by the reading passage.

Linker (L). Finds the the compatibly between sections of the texts and contemporary issues and explicates them. 

Summariser (S). Prepares a brief summary of the day’s reading.

What did I do during the war? I use to imagine what I would say in response when asked that question by a child of mine. None ever did. And I haven’t thought about it in a long, long while. Now Ukraine is happening.

I remember listening to “War Wounds,” a Selected Shorts podcast.  It’s a memoir by Tom Bissell about he and his father visiting places in Vietnamwhere his father had fought as a Marine. And I am reflecting again on theimaginary answer to “What did I do during the War? The Vietnam War?”

I protested. We as a family protested, marched with signs. Martha went to Washington as part of a delegation to talk with our congressmen. Had photographs taken of us with our two children, who were four and five at the time, picketing. They were snapped by newspaper photographers and by others, we learned later. For some of our photos wound up in FBI files we were told.

We were living in Asheville, North Carolina, where we had moved from New York City. My first job was working on a rock crusher for the brother of Martha’s step-father. The brother was a highway contractor and was working on the new interstate outside of Asheville. After some weeks—it may have been six weeks or it may have been less— I was able to leave for a job on the morning daily, The Asheville Citizen. And I was a reporter.

We became protesters almost accidentally. We attended Friends’ Meeting (Quakers, as they are more popularly known) . Pacifism has long been a tenet of the Friends and before long we were joining them in their rallies and other protest events and casually hosted gatherings that included some seriously committed pacifists such as the daughters of poet pacifist, Carl Sandburg. Personally I had never been a fan of war. This had a great deal, I am sure, to do with what I had read in school such as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, and growing up listening to war tales. Aunts and uncles had fought in World Wars I and II. I had ancestors who fought in the Revolution and in the Civil War (or the War Between the States, the name my great aunts would only use). What struck me in all these stories and accounts was the devastation that war brings. The devastation occurring in Ukraine.  But also the devastation in the lives of those touched by the ones who return from war and the ones who didn’t. Martha’s father was killed in the Hürtgen Forest in midwinter Germany 1944, leaving a wife, two daughters, and a widowed mother as well. 

Ever wonder what a social revolution led by Quakers would look like today? Peace loving, non-violent, decision making by consensus Quakers, the Religious Society of Friends? We’ll have a chance at an answer with an 8-session study of the book, Oppose and Propose, Lessons from Movement for a New Society by Andrew Cornell.

Movement for a New Society, or MNS, began in 1971 in Philadelphia by a group of young Quakers and became a national network of activists committed to building a nonviolent revolution. Before ending as an organization in 1988 it had a network of “collectives” in the Boston/Northeast Region, the Mid-Atlantic Region, Tucson, Seattle, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Chicago, Madison, Wisconsin, among other areas. This radical pacifist organization pioneered forms of consensus decision making, communal living, direct action, and self-education now central to today’s antiauthoritarian movements. 

We’ll start the study in June to give us time to order, receive and read the book before beginning the study.

We’re calling this a Gadfly Circle— gatherings to confront today’s social ills. We’ll begin Monday, June 6, hosted on a Discord Server from 5 pm to 6:10 pm, Central Daylight.

This Summer Monday Reading Circle schedule: 

June 6  13  20  27

July  11  18  25

Aug  1

Note. No session on July 4.

The book is available at this web site:

https://www.akpress.org/opposeandpropose.html . 

It is 200 pages and costs $12.

More on the Movement for a New Society (MNS) may be found below on this site

and here

https://movementforanewsociety.org

If you are curious and/or want to participate send me an email and I’ll send you an invitation.