From the Boston Sunday Globe, August 22, 2010:

[Re boycotts against Israel] “We used to lobby the US government, the Israeli government, and the Palestinians to do something,” said Sydney Levy, of Jewish Voices for Peace, a California-based group that collected 17,00 signatures since June asking investment firm TIAA-CREF to divest from companies involved in the occupation. But now we realize that we can take action on our own. We are only waiting for ourselves.” [Emphasis added.]

Last night I went to the Somerville Public Library to hear Boston College professor Charlie Derber, author of From Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy, talk. The place was packed.

Among the many thoughtful, thought-provoking the slight, soft-spoken prof had to say was about time (maybe that should be capitalized?) and how we’re running out of Time and need to “trick it” by addressing the most immediate, compelling problems NOW.

Walking home under a two-thirds moon, waiting to cross the street and pondering his talk, an SUV gunned through a red light. Just as I was about to step off the curb.

“So what?” you say? Massachusetts drivers do that. True. I didn’t get hit obviously. So what’s the big deal?

Maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety. But I think this kind of blatant disregard for civility is getting worse. (Steven Slater’s recent lionization reinforces my point.)

Here’s what I’m wondering just might be blowin’ in the wind: As this recession continues (Derber believes it’s really more like 25% unemployment), this hottest summer in history continues, and drought and Russian fires and Pakistani floods impact millions of people and scare the bejesus out of the rest of us, I think the day-to-day interactions between us are getting worse. People are highly stressed, pissed, confused. So why NOT drive through red lights, push and shove, be rude and greedy?

Seems to me that one of those immediate crises Derber suggested we need to address is exactly this. (And I’ve harped on this before.) On some level, people know what’s happening. That we’re not acknowledging that This Climate Change Thing is another Great Depression, another Pearl Harbor and, c’mon everybody, let’s roll up our sleeves and deal just makes them MORE pissed.

Who can blame them.

Back from Baltimore Yearly Meeting—with a brief visit to New England Yearly Meeting—and eager to “unpack.” To spend so much concentrated time with so many Quakers and make meaning of all I saw and heard will require lots of time, lots of discernment.

Meanwhile—a wind story from BYM: BYM was held at Frostburg State College, in the mountains of western Maryland, so far west that one day, when I’d walked to the very top of its hilly campus, I watched another hill, maybe a couple of miles away, being strip-mined.

Besides hills and classroom buildings and dormitories, Frostburg State also boasts playing fields. Many, many playing fields. A perfect setting for a sports summer camp for kids. So while Quakers from MD, VA and DC were at their yearly gathering, K—12 football players and soccer players were also on campus (noticing what food—and how much—these kids selected at the college’s cafeteria was an eye-opening experience).

But we Quakes and those athletes shared that hilly, breezy campus with another summer camp: a high school marching band from Raleigh, NC. My first meal at the gathering and not knowing anyone, I noticed these kids, clearly not jocks, racially mixed, some a little, well, geeky, and sat with them. They were delightful. So the next morning after breakfast, as the brass section rehearsed under a tent near the cafeteria, I lingered.

Their director (whose much-used voice got more and more gravelly as the week progressed), his bearing and sports garb possibly leading you to believe he was football coach, was measure-by-measure taking these kids through a rough passage.

He instructed the trumpet section to stop playing. “This piece has some unusual chords,” he noted to the others. “How many of you are playing weird, discordant notes?” Several kids raised their hands. “Play loud,” he told them. “Emphasizing those notes are what will make this piece special.”

Now, maybe it was the coffee talking, but his instructions seemed to be a metaphor of how a group, a gathering, a community, a “body” (as BYM and NEYM referred to the people attending their sessions) might function. If the center holds, if the trumpet section carries the tune, if there’s trust and safety and respect and civility, the weird and discordant voices of that group or body make that community special.

From time to time during my stay at Frostburg, the wind would blow in the right direction and I’d hear those same labored-over, difficult, beautiful measures being played. And I’d again ponder that potential metaphor.

Now you can, too.

["The wind of change is blowing all over the world today. it is sweeping away the old order and bringing into being a new order." Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963]

Tomorrow I leave for Baltimore Yearly Meeting to give a workshop, “Winds of Change.” To spend time with Quakers from Maryland, Virginia and DC and to listen to what winds of change blow through their meetings will be exciting and enlarging.

Daunting/exhausting, too. Kind of like those earliest visits with Reverend Owen Cardwell and Dr. Lynda Woodruff when, moment by moment, I’d ask myself: “Is this significant? Is this? What about that?”

I’m remembering, for example, that very first trip to Virginia when I was to first meet Lynda and Owen. Deacon Sharon Boswell from Owen’s  church picked me up from the airport. When I got in her car, I noticed her radio was set on the gospel music station. “Is this significant?” I wondered. Yes, it was.