Americans Don’t Understand What Violence Really Is
Racism Made America a Failed State, Just Like Its Greatest Mind Predicted. Americans Don’t Understand What Violence Really Is — And So They’re Stuck in a Vicious Cycle of It is the title of an article, published on Martin Luther King Day, by umair haque, an author I follow. I…
Not Only Food
I would normally be going to Des Moines this morning to help put together boxes of food with my Des Moines Mutual Aid friends. I won’t because predictions for heavy snow overnight would make travel hazardous. The predictions were accurate. And my brother is visiting. The Des Moines Mutual Aid’s…
Introduction to Mutual Aid and hierarchies
As I’ve been talking and writing about Mutual Aid, I’m not surprised that most of the questions relate to hierarchies. Mutual Aid is founded on a flat or horizontal hierarchy, where everyone has a voice in decisions. I would highly recommend Dean Spade’s book , “Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During…
A matter of faith
There are two definitions of faith. complete trust or confidence in someone or something.strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof. I wasn’t familiar with the use of apprehension above. I found one definition is “understanding or grasp”. I spent…
Mutual Aid stories
For the past week I’ve been thinking and praying a lot about Mutual Aid in preparation for a discussion we plan to have at my Quaker meeting tomorrow. As I have nearly every Saturday for the last year, I was with my Mutual Aid friends this morning for our weekly…
Mutual Aid is the Quaker way of being in the world
This week I’ve been writing to help refine what I hope will happen when we discuss Mutual Aid at my Quaker meeting this weekend. Quakers have a practice of using questions (queries) to help focus and stimulate participation in consideration of topics such as peace, Quaker education, etc. In the…
Does Mutual Aid speak to your condition?
For the past week I’ve been writing daily to prepare for a discussion at my Quaker meeting this Sunday. (See the table at the end listing those posts). Yesterday’s post is an example of why I need to prepare. I went a bit off track. There is a lot to…
More notes on Mutual Aid
I’ve been preparing for a discussion my Quaker meeting will have this weekend about Mutual Aid. At the end of this is a table of posts I’ve been writing to help me organize my thoughts. I am not satisfied with how this post has turned out, but these are notes,…
Spirituality and Mutual Aid
This continues my preparation for a discussion about Mutual Aid at my Quaker meeting this weekend. A couple of days ago I wrote about using queries (questions) to invite people to participate in the discussion. And began to come up with some queries. It occurred to me that some of…