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#peace

255 posts88 participants4 posts today

Considering leaving #mastodon, & #SocialMedia in general forever. Yes it serves as my lifeline to the #actuallyautistic & #transgender communities, but has also simultaneously amplified the volume of triggering political news I see on a daily basis. I’m not a fighter by nature, I just want to exist in #peace. But #Trump land has essentially declared #war on my people no less than 3 times in the last week, and I, gutless coward that I am, am too tired & weary to fight any longer.

… to volunteer for military training is to sign a pact with violence, and to hand the ultimate moral decision — to kill or not to kill — over to a faceless committee of men who, by their very training and indoctrination, consider genocide a legitimate means of settling human disputes.

— Jan de Hartog, The Captain (1967)

Hartog was a member of the Dutch Resistance then a war correspondent after his escape to England. He moved to the U.S. in the 1960s and became a Quaker.

I am proud of my friends and relatives who have served, especially for their deployments on missions for UN Peacekeeping and humanitarian emergencies, and I am grateful for the huge personal sacrifices they've made.

However, like Hartog, I could never surrender my right to judge right from wrong to senior officers or a government committee. Those decisions remain my responsibility alone, and lie at the core of my humanity.

After Meeting this past Sunday, some of our Friends went along to join another counter-protest at the Cladhan Hotel in Falkirk.

We want to provide a quiet and calming presence to everyone there. Our signs share messages of love and peace to all, because we all have a light within ourselves.

It is important, as Quakers, that our actions reflect our beliefs, and, as the cliche goes "be the change we want to see in the world."

Little quiet place, all to myself. All to myself.

For now. Perhaps some other hiker will walk by, stop to look at the stillness, listen to the silence. But I imagine they won't want to break the peace with noise, but rather, will want to breathe in the clearness, the beauty, the calm.

In this little quiet place, all to myself. All to myself.

Cannon Lake art print -- stevehendersonart.com/featured