Letters - 06 January 2017
From peace and beauty to EAPPI
Peace and beauty
This is an account of Quaker outreach in Lincoln.
At last, we were ready to take a small table and chairs to the High Street where we were going to make and distribute origami ‘Peace Cranes’ – a Japanese symbol of peace. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, two-year-old Sadako Sasaki survived. However, nine years later, she developed leukaemia. In hospital, she folded paper cranes believing the ancient Japanese legend that if she folded a thousand she would be granted a wish – which was for world peace.
Sadako folded several hundred cranes and when she died her family completed the shortfall, burying a thousand cranes with her. Her brother, Masahiro Sasaki, saved five of the cranes – each no larger than a fingernail – and has donated them towards peacebuilding. One of the final cranes is in the 9/11 Tribute Centre where thousands of other cranes made by the families and colleagues of victims of 9/11 also hang. Masahiro said: ‘I hope, by talking about that small wish for peace, the small ripple will become bigger and bigger.’
On Lincoln High Street we folded cranes and Don Sutherland, who has made cranes to raise awareness about many injustices, distributed them to members of the public; children were especially interested and adults commented on their beauty. We told people about Quakers, recounted Sadako’s story and had copies of the Friend available – a Quaker presence amid the incipient Christmas crowd.
Pat Taylor
Post-industrial humanity
What is our value when robots can assemble things; computers can organise our transactions, predict our behaviour, design things; and when we need high earnings to have property in a finite planet with a rising population? We know that the financial and intellectual capital to build and programme computers is in hands that seek to exploit us.
Thank a universal loving God, born of Christianity, for our democracy. But democracy has its limitations. When defensive, when the destitute are near, and they are tempted to random violence and organised revolution, we turn to security, to exclusiveness. People vote Right.
We have two values.
If we raise our children and grandchildren with the air quality, nutrition, space, quiet and education that they need to learn information technology, they can protect themselves from exploitation. If they are raised in love with their fellow humans and a God who loves them, even when humanitarianism seems thankless, they will seek to prevent information technology and those who control it from exploiting their fellow humans.
As people who experience the human condition, we are uniquely well placed to care for each other. We can share, record and treasure the experience, we can form mutual support groups, we can provide social care for one another when we are disabled, out of fellow-feeling rather than a desire for gain. We can transcend the disappointments of personal letdown and rise on the wind in our wings from the prophets.
Friends, we must continue to do so.
Alick Munro
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