The discipline of maintaining a weekly vigil for peace on the steps of the Peterborough town house helps me pay attention to the many ways the war-making mentality affects our consciousness and our decisions every day. No matter what the weather, no matter what preoccupations have dominated my thoughts and emotions during the week, on Saturday it's ( Read more... )

Quaker anti-slavery activist Lucretia Mott kept getting into difficult situations in the 1840's because she insisted that slavery needed to be abolished and possibly even more because she, a woman, insisted on speaking out about it in public. Mary Clemmer tells this story in Our Famous Women (1884):


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I have a friend,  monadnockquaker , who is taking part in the Gaza Freedom March. She has not posted to her LiveJournal blog since arriving, and I am a little concerned for her safety because there are frightening scenes of police beating marchers on YouTube (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5cMIViFPt8 ).  These are incoherent cell-phone videos and contain no ( Read more... )

Theo of the radical British folk group Seize the Day ( seizetheday.org or www.myspace.com/seizethedayfolk) just sent this suggestion, and while I'm still working up the courage to act on it, I thought it was so compelling that I ought to do my small part to make it go viral. I've been thinking we need a creative nonviolent way to respond to the ( Read more... )

Lowell's  Coalition for a Better Acre (CBA) is holding its Board elections  at 4:00 p.m. on September 29, and the organization CBA Members for Justice (CBAMJ) is running a full slate of candidates for the Board, all committed to restoring the CBA to its original activist purposes and righting recent wrongs, including the firing of Darcie Boyer and ( Read more... )

 
Lindolfo is a co-host in the Spanish language portion of "Thinking Out Loud" and Darcie is a long-time movement friend, whom I've known since the days of the "Footlocker Eight". They were both summarily fired from Lowell's unique nonprofit housing advocacy group The Coalition for a Better Acre (CBA). The CBA does both affordable-housing ( Read more... )