Role models
Will young Friends be able, later in life, to say that they have been inspired by Friends working for peace, often at great cost to themselves?
Becoming a member in the mid-1980s my list includes Nicholas Gillett, Joseph and Else Pickvance, Arthur and Ursula Windsor, Ted Dunn and Leonard Bird, author of Costa Rica: The Unarmed Democracy.
In the Friend, many years ago, Leonard Bird wrote that ‘War is out – definitely out’. He could not understand justification for war, which ‘increases deaths, mutilation, refugees and intensifies human suffering’.
He saw the tacit acceptance of war as the consequence of the tremendous pressure of generations of belief in militarism and war, believing that Friends’ task is to question and challenge this – and whatever excuses and apparent justification may be offered – on all occasions.
His staunch upholding of the ‘historic peace testimony’ in the Friend is now continued by such contributors as Ken Veitch and Symon Hill.
B Panvel

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