A Friend to Everyone Except the Billionaires
How do we become peaceful, active resistance in this less than civil war?
Not far from where I grew up, in what was then a small town in Bucks County Pennsylvania, Quakertown, there was a small white stucco Quaker meetinghouse. We drove by it almost daily, to the library, to get our Book-It pizzas, to thrift stores and grocery outlets and the scattered scary aisles of the Q-Mart. There are few structures I remember as well from nearly 18 years of living in Quakertown, as I remember that Quaker Meetinghouse, built in the 1860s. I never stepped foot in it, I never walked on its property, I never (to my knowledge) even met a Quaker while I was growing up. But, in a sea of Pennsylvania fieldstone farmhouses, white stucco churches, covered bridges, and the suburbia growing up around them, I remember the little stucco building with green shutters, quiet, unassuming, on a tiny side street to the west of downtown.
Growing up in Quakertown, in a state named for Quaker William Penn, in southeastern Pennsylvania, a place proliferated with the anabaptist (Brethren, Amish, Hutterite, every kind of Mennonite, and Quakers too), the lore of pacifism was commonplace to us. We understood the role these kinds of believers took during the history of our country’s most glaring blight: enslavement of people made in God’s image. The underground railroad, religious exemption from the military, a refusal to “take either side” because both sides were complicit, either in direct enslavement (the south) or in profit from enslaved people’s labor (the north), and more. In every way, these peaceful people were anything but passive. They operated vast systems of rescue and recovery, opened their meetinghouses for prayer and makeshift hospitals, and practiced non-violence, even as violence was done to them.
They were known then and now as “The Friends.”
You remember the Quakers too: Susan B. Anthony, Levi Coffin, John Woolman, George Fox, Johns Hopkins, John Greenleaf Whittier, and so many more.
Over the weekend I finished a book called Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. It has no author byline except “The Friends of Attention.” The title and subtitle speak for themselves, but it is the “friends of attention,” I want to talk a little bit about today. Especially one term they spoke about and why I think it’s such a helpful metaphor for those of us who feel captive to the attention economy.