How Quakerly! part 3

Whew! What a whirlwind the last couple of days have been. I keep thinking "I want to blog about (fill in the blank) but then I'm carried away to yet another fun and fulfilling activity. Let's see: When we last saw our heroine ...

... she was going to an interest group about Vietnam, entitled "Stepping Out On Faith: Another Life Is Possible". Virginia Lockett is a physical therapist who has moved to Vietnam to do volunteer work in a rehabilitation facility. Predictably, Vietnam has a high number of people who have lost limbs stepping on land mines. A lesser known, equally grave (and wholly preventable) problem, is head and spinal cord injuries resulting from motorbike accidents. Virginia trains young physical therapists; she and her husband have also imported and designed adaptive equipment to help people be able to function with their disabilities more readily. She is also working to make helmet use, something which is virtually nonexistent now, widespread. She has founded an NGO called Steady Footsteps. (I'd link to it, but this computer will not allow it. You'll have to look it up yourself.) I love Vietnam, and I was inspired by her talk, her optimism, her humor. It's been enlightening to be in my money workshop with her too.

Last night there was a play/puppet show created and acted by my daughter's Junior Gathering workshop joined by many others. It was called The Neighbor (following the Gathering theme "And Who Is My Neighbor?") and based on the folktale The Woman Who Outshone the Sun. Musical accompaniement was provided by sacred harp singers, as well as a band made up of hammered dulcimer, fiddle, steel drum, concertina and various percussive instruments. It was so beautifully done (and I especially liked the giant black and white striped mosquito; now THAT's a mosquito I could take home with me!) I hope there will be a dvd of it available to purchase.

Today, I visited a traveling museum exhibit about yet one more shameful slice of U.S. history: the internment of German-American (as well as Japanese and Italians from South America) civilians in concentration camps scattered throughout the U.S. during WW2. Many of these people were forcibly removed from homes throughout Latin America and the U.S., and shipped to camps ostensibly because they were under suspician for being spies. Actually, under a plan conceived by George Marshall (whose name is on the Marshall Plan) these civilians would be used in trade for U.S. prisoners of war. Never mind the simple fact that they had left Germany (or Japan or Italy) 30 years earlier, or the fact that war was raging in their supposed "home" countries, or the fact that a number of them were actually German Jews and were delivered directly into Hitler's hands. Pretty diabolical, if you ask me.

On a close to home note, I was saddened to see that one of those camps was at Fort McCoy near Sparta, Wisconsin (the very same place that hundreds of Cuban "boat people" were interned in the 1980s. before being shipped back to Cuba or granted assylum in the U.S. -- yet another shameful stop along the way.)

It's a shocking story which has largely been kept under wraps. No effort has been made to make reparations for these people or their descendents, as was belatedly done for the Japanese-Americans. Dateline did a breathlessly outraged and sensational episode on it in 1996 (I think.) I couldn't help but wonder where Dateline has been for the last 6 years when we are being primed for the very same attrocities to be repeated (and in fact are being repeated at Guantanamo.) While I am glad that they "exposed" this story (for all the awareness it has raised) they stuck with something that is largely safe, as it happened so long ago. We can all let out a big sigh of relief and say, "Thank Heaven that something like that won't happen today!" Yeah, right. If you want to read more about it, look up the Traces Museum in Minneapolis.

Then to round out the day, world famous blogger Poodle Doc and I took our children and went on a mini-road trip, in search of the Franconia Sculpture Park. After many miles of driving and a frantic phone call to Mr. Ether at work ("WHERE did you say it was, again?") we found it, and it was interesting. I was a little disapointed that it wasn't the life work of a Norwegian bachelor farmer sculpting larger-than-life Bible characters out of concrete bejewelled with broken bottles and mirrors. No, it was sculptures made by a variety of REAL artists. Many had a political theme. I was especially struck by one called Literal Biblical Horrors, that unfortunately brought to mind the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib (but we don't torture, the Commander Guy says so.)

I hope I can post some photos of both the puppet show and the sculptures at a later date.

We got back too late for dinner in the cafeteria. But if God wanted us to eat good food, S/he wouldn' have made Dairy Queens, right?

What wonders will the next two days hold? Tomorrow we will be displaying the Minnesota and Wisconsin portions of the Eyes Wide Open exhibit. The whole exhibition has gotten too large to be able to be displayed in its entirety. There's a sad commentary on this sad and shameful war.

I want to believe that we are in the midst of a nonviolent revolution, as many theologians say we are. Yes, I still hope.