Letters - 04 February 2011
From Canterbury to Tucson
Cycle to Yearly Meeting Gathering
Cycle, carbon free, over two days from London to Yearly Meeting Gathering (YMG), Canterbury. This is an invitation to start your holiday a day earlier, arrive with friends of all ages and bring your own bike for the campus.
In 1388 Chaucer’s pilgrims walked. In 2011 cycling is commitment to our YMG theme – ‘Growing in the Spirit, changing the way we live to sustain the world we live in’.
Our mixed-age ride will gather on Friday 29 July at 11am at the site of the Tabard Inn, 77 Borough High Street, London SE1. Once out of London, we will follow Sustrans Route One (www.sustrans.org.uk). It uses mainly small country roads and cycle lanes and is well marked. Wearing fluorescent Quakers for Peace vests, we will travel eight to ten miles per hour as a group, approximately forty miles each day, carrying spare inner tubes and water.
We have reserved thirty-eight beds at Medway Youth Hostel, Gillingham on 29 July at a modest cost. However, hospitality and refreshments from Meetings en route will be welcome.
Let me know soon if you plan to come and if you would like one of the reserved beds. Under-18s must have a responsible adult, please.
Laura Conyngham LauraC@eclipse.co.uk
Government cuts
In response to Martin Quick’s letter (7 January), I should like to assure him that I am most concerned about government cuts. Answers to letters have been totally unsatisfactory and my anxiety about the welfare cuts in particular have caused me reluctantly to resign my membership of the Liberal Democrat Party.
Many vulnerable people will suffer indirectly because the charities they rely on will find it increasingly difficult to raise funds – especially less popular ones like those aiming to help asylum seekers and refugees.
A moving article in the Guardian on 13 January vividly showed how removing the mobility component of the Disability Living Allowance would seriously reduce the quality of life of disabled people in residential homes, causing them to forego keenly anticipated outings or visits home.
A younger friend, already receiving Incapacity Benefit for a chronic and debilitating illness, dreads her forthcoming re-assessment. Her condition, genuine and incapacitating though it is, will not ‘tick the right boxes’. The test is so stringent and narrowly defined that far fewer claimants are now deemed eligible for support. Atos Origin, a private company that has recently renewed its £300 million three-year contract to carry out these assessments for the Department of Work and Pensions, doesn’t necessarily employ doctors in its assessment, often doesn’t take the medical diagnosis of the GP into account – and has to meet targets.
We should indeed speak up for the sick and vulnerable who are thus bearing the heaviest burden.
Thelma Percy
Palestine papers – Al Jazeera
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and Quaker Peace and Social Witness (QPAW) and European Friends, have in practical ways followed the Israel/Palestinian problems, ever since the end of the Holocaust.
After the fateful Israeli wars, in 1948 we had 10,000 children and their mothers taking part in pre-school playgroups in Gaza.
While working for QPS from 1978-1986 I visited Gaza, Israel, Jordan and occupied territories a number of times. The Al Jazeera documents, published in the Guardian on 22 January, demonstrate a strange lack of confidence in the Palestinian negotiators, who must have been persuaded by the hosts of peace negotiators to be too accommodating. Thus invalidating the success of any future peace talks and threatening a further confrontation, which could involve us all, and be a holocaust for the Palestinians.
As Friends we can however ask, where is the funding coming from to build the nine-metre high wall across the land? Or where is the money coming from to cover the Judean Hills and the Old City of Jerusalem with Israeli settlements?
In the 1950s the Israeli government was given huge subsidies by the USA. Is this policy still continuing? Could Quaker organisations in Europe find out for us? Are we also able to ask for the help in this of Shan Cretin, General Secretary of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and Joe Volk of Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL)
Brenda Bailey
Breadth of work
It was good to be reminded of the range of the work of QPSW in Symon Hill’s review (21 January), even if it ‘is impossible to be aware of the full breadth of the work’. Could I add a word of appreciation for the Quaker Relief Grants given to support particular projects put forward by Local Meetings.
Although the Quaker presence in northern Uganda has moved on to meet new needs, a relief grant to assist the Gulu Youth Development Association improve its buildings for the skills training of needy and disadvantaged young people there has continued a Quaker link to the area.
John Cottis
Roses at the Retreat
What a superb project to re-create the rose garden at the Retreat in York (14 January). I wish the project well.
However, I notice I did have a reaction to Bronwen Gray’s reference to ‘despite serious mental health issues, many patients relish contact with nature… ’ Why ‘despite’? In my experience as a psychotherapist working with people who have ‘mental health problems’, I have often been made aware that alongside deep suffering very often lies a depth of connection with nature, sentient awareness – a sense of ‘otherness’ that our more ‘normal’ consensus reality focus predominantly excludes.
I cannot help wondering if what we like to call mental health ‘problems’ in individuals, might in fact at least partially reflect a level of sensitivity to the depths of human experience that the majority of us may never register at all.
Perhaps our mainstream culture could also do with a bit more sensitising and more exposure to the exquisite sights and smells of the rose garden.
Sue Holden
Spiritual basis of Meeting for Worship
Sincere explorations into the spiritual basis of our Society will always be respected, but the danger of unrestricted diversity is that we eventually fail to understand each other.
I was going to say that I regarded Ian Flintoff’s comment (28 January) as being nihilistic, until I came to check up the meaning of the word in Wikipedia, and found such a multiplicity of contradictory meanings that the word itself became meaningless. I suspect that there is a danger that the Society of Friends faces the same challenge of being so insipid that it will become unfit for purpose.
When I first attended a Meeting for Worship nearly forty years ago, I felt the presence of God there. After six weeks of attendance I decided to visit ten other Meetings for Worship on the ten succeeding Sundays. When I returned I applied for membership remaining an attender was not an option. I have never regretted my application, but at that time I found a Christian Church without the middle management, and that ‘spoke to my condition’ and still does.
Richard Capon
Another Tucson
Friends will have been saddened at the reports of the violent culture in the USA following the wild shootings in Tucson. Yet, there is another Tucson, which is a pocket of sanity and humanity. Our friends Felice and Jack Cohen Joppa have lived with their family in Tucson for over thirty years regularly producing their paper the Nuclear Resister. The paper, and the network of peace activists, meticulously report anti-nuclear civil resistance in the United States and beyond, with emphasis on providing support for the women and men jailed for any nonviolent peace action. Since 1990 they have reported anti-war arrests in North America. The current issue has just arrived and includes reports on, among others, a demonstration by the Veterans for Peace at the White House against the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan; a peaceful demonstration by five Catholic brothers and sisters in a Plowshares Disarmament Action at the Trident home port at Bangor (US west coast) Naval Base where they keep enough killing power to annihilate the planet; support for the whistle blower, Bradley Manning, in ‘spartan solitary confinement’ in what basically amounts to conditions of torture. There is also a moving letter from an anti-war prisoner that includes details of the almost barbaric inside of a US jail in Pennsylvania.
Their paper is a ‘beacon of hope’; their voices (would that they were heeded) should be more widely heard.
Rae Street
