Queries on Social and Civic Responsibility
It’s Quaker practice that each month we, as meetings, consider a set of queries, on a different subject each month. Meetings vary in how they consider the Queries; ours reads them after meeting for worship on the First Sunday and provides time for people to speak to them. The queries are set by each Yearly Meeting, and so, though both topics and specific queries resemble each other from one Yearly Meeting to another, they also evolve in slightly different directions. Here are the advices and queries for Pacific Yearly Meeting, the one to which I belong. This month, the advices and queries are on social and civic responsibility. And the queries are:
What am I doing to carry my share of responsibility for the government of our community, nation, and world?
Am I persistent in my efforts to promote constructive change?
How do we attend to the suffering of others in our local community, in our state and nation, and in the world community?
Do we try to understand the causes of suffering, and do we address them as a Meeting?
How do we, individually and as a Meeting, support the organizations that work to bring the testimonies of Friends into reality in our society?
As is usual with the queries, we begin with ones directed at the individual and move on to ones that speak to what the meeting as a whole is doing.
So, how do I as an individual, and how does my meeting as a Quaker meeting, act on issues of social and civic responsibility? Since not all of my readers are Friends, I’ll start with what our structure looks like. Like other Quaker meetings, we have a committee that concerns itself with these issues; it’s called Peace and Social Concerns Committee. Sometimes in larger meetings this committee will form subcommittees, or even split off separate committees; at one point, when I was part of Palo Alto Friends Meeting, we had a Peace and Social Action Committee, a committee that dealt more with local hunger and homelessness, and a Sanctuary Committee, for assisting refugees from the civil war that was then going on in El Salvador. Orange County Friends Meeting is smaller, and we only have the Peace and Social Concerns Committee. There’s also an outreach budget, where we as a meeting donate to organizations (both Quaker organizations and other organizations) that share our concerns. Or in theory we do. Unfortunately, Orange County Friends hasn’t made its budget the past couple of years, and our ability to meet our outreach budget has suffered; in our last meeting for business we discussed what to do about this issue.
In addition to standing committees, there are things that come up as matters of individual concern. One of our older members has been active for years in social service activities in the San Clemente area. Some of us have been involved with the Catholic Worker house in Santa Ana, Isaiah House, to various degrees and in various ways. One Friend has been particularly engaged with what’s happened in Sri Lanka, and has been informing the rest of us, both via Facebook and in real life.
When I considered these queries this month, what came to my mind when I thought of what I do individually was that actually a lot of my concern about issues of social and civic responsibility is expressed online. And, on the one hand, there are some situations where blogging can be a real form of activism; you can see that both in the way countries like Iran try to contain their bloggers, and in the way politicians in the US try to appeal to netroots. But, on the other hand, for a small time blogger like myself, a lot of the time it feels more like a hobby, even a time sink, chatting with online friends, than real activism. Should I sometimes be getting off the blog, and doing other things?
June 30th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Blogging’s just another form of being social and has its opportunities and limits. I’ve seen it bring new ideas and information to people who wouldn’t have necessarily been reached face to face. But yes, it can be a time sink.
The question of being “small time” is kind of a different one. A dozen Friends holding faded signs at a busy intersection once a week is “small time.” Yet their witness can make a difference or plant a seed. Online, I was surprised at how quickly the then-and-still small time Quaker blogging community was able to rally around Tom Fox’s abduction. Sometimes the small things we do are group practice for the real work ahead.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
If we can’t “do” the good things we’d like to accomplish–actually stop some USian war, for example–then it doesn’t make sense to worry overmuch about “What works” or “What doesn’t”–or how “active” we’re being, or failing to be.
We want the world better–but we can’t just dash out and make it so. To “act” there needs be a preliminary understanding, agreement on why & what and how, or nothing happens–or something happens, but what happens is like a nightmare of a bullfight, in which we charge the swirling cape again and again until exhaustion and the matador’s sword bring us down.
So never let anybody shame you out of “mere talking.” “Do no harm” may not give us anything to brag about, but it’s way better than the alternatives!
July 2nd, 2009 at 7:08 am
Good points, Martin and forrest. I suppose what I really need to do is weigh blogging against whatever specific other things I may need to be doing in my life (which may sometimes mean getting off the blog for a while to do some particular other thing), rather than worry about being too small time or spending too much time just talking.