A Quaker educator recently told me he had appreciated something I wrote about the way Quaker culture plays out in Quaker schools. It was a 2012 blog post, Were Friends part of Obama’s Evolution?
It was a bit of a random post at the time. I had read a widely shared interview that afternoon and was mulling over the possibilities of a behind-the-scenes Quaker influence. This sort of randomness happens frequently but in the rush of work and family I don’t always take the time to blog it. That day I did and a few years later it influence spline on some small way.
It reminds me of an old observation: the immediate boost we get when friends comment in our blog posts or like a Facebook update is an immediate hit of dopamine — exciting and ego gratifying. But the greater effect often comes months and years later when someone finds something of yours that they’re searching for. This delayed readership may be one of the greatest differences between blogging and Facebooking.
Alexander is one of the leading voices on the rise of a level of mass incarceration in this country in the last 25 years. It’s hard to overstate just how devastating our prison-industrial complex has become. The huge numbers of African American men in jails for nonviolent crimes begs comparison to the darkest days of slavery. Bill Clinton escalated mass incarceration and the “War on Drugs” as a way to prove his political toughness.
The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.
We tend to remember the Clinton Administration through rose-colored glasses but there were a lot of WTF moments we’ve forgotten – three strikes, the sanctions against Iraqi civilians, the way cruise missile strikes seemed to magically coincide with administration scandals, Bill’s serial philandering and Hillary’s slut-shaming responses. On paper, HRC is the most qualified candidate to ever run for the presidency. But if she’s running on the Clinton brand, she needs to explain how her political choices differ from her husband’s 20 years ago.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses
My mother died a few days ago. While I’m overwhelmed with the messages of prayers and condolences, at least at some level it feels like cheating to accept them too fully. This isn’t a new condition. This is just the final moment of a slow-motion death.
A little over five years ago my mother was formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It was quite brave of her to get the testing done when she did. This had always been her most-feared scenario for aging. Growing up, we had befriended an active elderly neighbor who had gently died in her sleep after a minor slip on some ice. My mom thought that was the best exit ever. She swore Mrs. Goldsmith had come to her in a dream the next night to congratulate herself, saying “See, I told you I was lucky!” For years afterwards, my mother convinced herself that she would go in a similarly elegant way.
My mom, Liz, must have sensed that Alzheimer’s was a possibility when she scheduled that doctor’s visit. The news didn’t come as much of a surprise to us family. I had been joking for years that my mom seemed to have only twenty stories that she kept on rotation. After she read a study that crossword puzzles keep your brain sharp as we age, she became an obsessive crossword puzzler; when the Sudoku craze hit, she was right on top of it. She had bravely bought her first house in her late 60s. How proud she was. At the time she let us all know, repeatedly, that she would be leaving it “in a box.” Caulking trim, replacing windows, and troubleshooting a mud room leak that defied a dozen contractors became her occupation, along with volunteering and watching grandkids. But by 2010, she must have known she wasn’t going to have Mrs. Goldsmith’s luck. It was time to adjust.
When she called to tell me the diagnosis, she couldn’t even use the A‑word. She told me her “brain was dying” and that the doctor was putting her on Aricept. A quick Google search confirmed this was an Alzheimer’s drug and a call with the doctor later that afternoon helped map out the road ahead.
Alzheimer’s is a slow-motion death. She’s been disappearing from us for a long while. Regular outings became less frequent till we couldn’t even take her out to a nearby restaurant for her birthday. As words disappeared and speech began faltering, I’d show her recent kid photos on my phone and tell stories to fill the emptying space. Eventually she stopped showing interest even in this. On my last regular visit with her, I brought the kids and we had lots of fun taking pictures. Mom kept pointing out at the phone’s display as if it were a mirror. But conversation was too disjointed and after a few minutes, my kids started wandering in ever widening circles looking for interesting buttons and alarms to touch and pull and I had to round them up to leave.
In the past few weeks her forgetfulness has extended to eating and swallowing. Intervention would only buy a little more time until she forgot how to breathe. Alzheimer’s is a one way trip.
On my last few visits she was mostly sleeping. She’s was calm, preternaturally calm. Lying on her back, pale and peaceful, she looked as if she might already be a body resting in a casket. Only the slight rise of sheets as she breathed gave away the news that she was still with us, if barely. I felt awkward just sitting there. Some people are good in these kinds of situations, but I self-consciously struggle. With little chance of interaction, I struck on the idea of reading from a favorite book of poems that she had read to me on countless nights as a child. “Up into the cherry tree, who should climb but little me?” I don’t know if she heard me or pictured the cherry tree in her haze, but it was a way for us to be together.
The slow-motion nature of Alzheimer’s means she slept a lot until she didn’t. For reasons that go deep into biography, she was a wonderfully friendly person who didn’t have a lot of close friends anymore. It seems peculiar that one can walk upon the earth for so many decades and only have a dozen or so people notice your departure. But then maybe that’s the norm for those who live deep into their eighties. Most of us will leave life with the same kind of quiet ripples with which we entered.
A growing list of stories is suggesting that black churches in the South are being targeted for arson once again (although one of the more publicized cases seems to be lightning-related). This was a big concern in the mid-1990s, a time when a Quaker program stepped up to give Friends the chance to travel to the South to help rebuild. From a 1996 Friends Journal editorial:
Sometimes a news article touches the heart and moves people to reach out to one another in unexpected ways. So it was this winter when the Washington Post published a piece on the rash of fires that have destroyed black churches in the South in recent months… When Friend Harold B. Confer, executive director of Washington Quaker Workcamps, saw the article, he decided to do something about it. After a series of phone calls, he and two colleagues accepted an invitation to travel to western Alabama and see the fire damage for themselves. They were warmly received by the pastors and congregations of the three Greene County churches. Upon their return, they set to work on a plan.
I’m not sure whether Confer’s plan is the right template to follow this time, but it’s a great story because it shows the importance of having a strong grassroots Quaker ecosystem. I don’t believe the Washington Quaker Workcamps were ever a particularly well-funded project. But by 1996 they had been running for ten years and had built up credibility, a following, and the ability to cross cultural lines in the name of service. The smaller organizational size meant that a newspaper article could prompt a flurry of phone calls and visits and a fully-realized program opportunity in a remarkably short amount of time.
Update: another picture from 1996 Alabama, this time from one of my wife Julie’s old photo books. She’s second from the left at the bottom, part of the longer-stay contingent that Roberts mentions.
A two-night scouts camping trip with two of my kids to the county facilities at Camp Acagisca nears Mays Landing turned into a one night with one kid affair (my 11yo got way too mouthy when it came time to decide who was going to share a tent with dad and went home immediately; the 9yo ended up in a meltdown mid morning on the second day.)
Camp at dusk
A visitor stops hopping for a moment
Francis stays up to read Curious George stories by flashlight
Cooking eggs in a ziploc bag
Breakfast time
The group starts off on a hike down to Great Egg Harbor River
Cool growth on downed trees
A broken down out building from when this was a Girl Scouts camp. thr 2012 Mays Landing derecho came right through here and closed the camp for a long while.
River side
I photographed this mostly to have the emergency number handy if needed.
From the first Hammonton Food Truck Festival. Cool stuff but the lines are way too long for a single parent with four antsy kids.
One of our friends said the line waits were up to 1.5 hrs. I could just about have jumped on the expressway to Philly, gotten some Federal Donuts, and made it back in that time. I like that Hammonton has made then edges of a hipster map but this is a bit silly. We ended up getting frozen treats at the Wawa around the corner.
A striking difference between this fictional WW I era pie chart and today’s version is how much simpler the federal budget was back then. Not only was it a lot smaller – vastly smaller – there were many fewer categories. A hundred years ago, the budget was mostly military (75% of the budget) – even before entry into WW I – a large part of which was to pay off expenses incurred during the Civil War from 50 years earlier and the recently-ended Spanish-American War. The nonmilitary portions were labeled “Indians,” “Postal Deficiencies,” and “Civil and Miscellaneous.”
At the end of the evening there was a workshop on animal night vision. After drawing in the dark, everyone turned their flashlights to the table to see what they had created.
Delaware City and its nearby refineries as seen from the Heron tower at dusk.
Walking over to the river to catch the dawn.
The sun rises over the bay.
A tugboat pushes a barge downriver at Sunrise.
Mist over the moat.
Fort silouette.
Mirror of the water.
Campers taking down their tents.
A stairwell going up from the sallyport in the front entrance of the fort.
A look across the “newer” part of the island created by dredged river bottom.
The island is only accessible by ferry. Most nights, the entire staff disembark back to Delaware on the last ferry (we joined them last time) but for the first time in anyone’s memory, they had this campout. If our family didn’t scare them they might make it a more regular event.
We camped out in the old marching ground right inside the fort and got to walk around all of the safe parts of the fort. In addition, the staff had lots of great programs:
Scavenger hunt
Paranormal ghost tour including the normally-closed Endicott Tunnel
Campfire with s’mores
I did the nature trail on north side of island in near pitch black
A night vision workshop about how nocturnal animals see in the dark (rods and cones in the eye).
The camping of course
In the morning there was a guided nature walk where we learned about birds and mammals on island.
A growing list of stories is suggesting that black churches in the South are being targeted for arson once again (although one of the more publicized cases seems to be lightning-related). This was a big concern in the mid-1990s, a time when a Quaker program stepped up to give Friends the chance to travel to the South to help rebuild. From a 
