Community Immunity – A Quakerly Concept

Photo by Summer Moon Scriver

The Quaker testimony on community is one of the ways we attempt to put our faith into practice. This belief in the equality of all people and the value placed on sharing and mutual obligation contrasts with the behavior of a materialistic and individualistic age.

Here’s what the testimony on community looks like. We make meals when a new baby arrives or when someone goes through chemotherapy.  When a family’s house burns down, we give shelter and help build a new one. Some of us mentor school kids, others drive shuttle buses for seniors, and many serve on the boards of non-profits.

There’s another important way to act on the testimony of community – immunizations.

Earlier this year, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that my county is the worst in the nation when it comes to vaccinating children, with only 28 percent of kindergarteners and 11 percent of sixth graders meeting school vaccine requirements. These numbers are troubling in light of my state health department’s recent announcement of a statewide pertussis (whooping cough) epidemic. The agency projects we’re headed for 3000 cases this year, an alarming jump over the 965 reported in 2011.

Pertussis is a highly contagious bacterial infection that usually starts with mild cold symptoms. For young children, it typically causes uncontrollable coughing spells, followed by gagging or vomiting and a “whoop” sound. Infants are most vulnerable for severe complications and death. Last year, 38 infants in my state were hospitalized with pertussis, and 2 died.

Many of our communities are at risk for a variety of vaccine-preventable diseases like pertussis because thousands of parents refuse to immunize their children. As a school nurse and former immunization nurse, I’ve answered parents’ doubts that diseases like polio and measles still exist (they do and in some places are on the rise); I’ve heard fears about a study linking measles vaccines and autism (the report was retracted, and the doctor involved lost his license); and I’m aware that some perceive school vaccine requirements as government intrusion.

Others, though, can’t receive this preventive care even if they wanted to. Most vaccinations aren’t given to babies under 2 months because their immature immune systems can’t respond. Older children and adults whose immune systems are weak because of illness or aging can’t be vaccinated, either.

Here’s where our testimony on community comes in. When enough of us get our vaccinations, we benefit even those who don’t.  Such “community immunity” cuts the spread of diseases like pertussis to our vulnerable neighbors.

Now it’s time for us to do our part to achieve community immunity. Check immunization records. Schedule an appointment. Get yourself and your children immunized. It’s what we Quakers do for each other.

Walking in Circles

Carved labyrinth at
Whispers of Nature

            

           “Our lives are an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn. That there is no end in nature but every end is a beginning.” 

                                 ~  Ralph Waldo Emerson

             I spent part of May 5 walking in circles. Sometimes such circuitous movement is a result of confusion    and frustration, or it’s evidence of procrastination. But that day, my circling was intentional.

Three years ago, the Labyrinth Society, an international organization founded in 1998, designated the first Saturday in May as World Labyrinth Day. I learned about this commemoration from friends Susie and Nick Teague.  In 2006, they founded Whispers of Nature and since then have been developing an outdoor labyrinth. In honor of the global labyrinth event, Susie and Nick invited the public to walk the unique maze they’ve created.

Path surrounded by
herbs & flowers

While the precise origin of the labyrinth is unknown, the earliest datable labyrinth was built in Greece around 1300 B.C. This ancient tool for walking meditation can be found in schools, prisons, parks, hospitals, spas, churches, and retreat centers.  Many labyrinths around the world replicate the one laid in the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France around 1200 A.D.  It has eleven circuits, or concentric circles, with a twelfth, at the center, in the shape of a six-petaled rosette. The labyrinth at Whispers of Nature has seven circuits, surrounded by a medicinal herb and flower garden. 

Whatever its design, the labyrinth is viewed as a metaphor for life’s journey.

There is no magic formula, no “right” way to walk a labyrinth.  It’s a mystical practice of the simple action of putting one foot in front of the other, following the labyrinth’s unexpected turns, and ending up at the center. A sign at the Whispers of Nature labyrinth offers simple instructions:

“Follow the single path in and out.  You may use it as a walking meditation, play music, or sing.  Your walk may be joyous, quiet, thoughtful or celebratory.  Choose your intention each time you walk.”

On World Labyrinth Day, I walked with intention and attention for three friends who are on their own walks with cancer, visualizing them held in a circle of love. 

Sculpture at the center of labyrinth

Sunshine glistened off the glass ornaments in the garden, and the wind whispered through the lavender, poppies, calendula, tulips, mint, and dozens of other plants I couldn’t identify. As always happens for me when I walk a labyrinth, I had moments of being uncertain of the route, of thinking I’d missed a turn, and then resting in the knowledge that the path would guide me if I trust it, slow down, and let go.

When I returned home, a copy of Western Friend waited in my mailbox; the issue’s theme – “Friends on Aging and Dying.”  The magazine fell open to “Every End Is A Beginning,” an essay by Susan Tweit, recounting her husband’s death from brain cancer.  The title is taken from the Emerson quote above.  I can’t imagine a more fitting thought to carry forward from my walk on World Labyrinth Day—and every day.

Afterthought #4 - Pilgrimage to Manzanar

The main Manzanar Pilgrimage event in 2011 | Photo: Zach Behrens/KCET

Last month I blogged about the 70^th anniversary of the opening of Manzanar, a concentration camp in southern California.  Grace Ito Coan, a member of Sacramento Friends Meeting, was among the U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry imprisoned there from 1942-1945. Her story in Western Friend put a personal face on disgraceful actions of the U.S. government.

This weekend, while I gathered with Quakers at Pacific Northwest Quarterly Meeting, I thought of the people  participating in the 43^rd Annual Pilgrimage to the site of the camp, designated twenty years ago as Manzanar National Historic Site.  Zach Behrens, Editor-in-Chief, Blogs at KCET, wrote about his plans to attend:  The Importance of Visiting Manzanar. A video from the 2011 pilgrimage ( Manzanar Pilgrimage)  as well as Twitter posts from this year’s event (http://twitter.com/#!/manzanarcomm), gave me a sense of what happened there this weekend.  And it reminded me again of the cruelty of fear. Remembering is an important step toward making sure such discrimination never happens again.

Living Below the Line

 "Poverty is the worst form of violence"   ~ Gandhi

Have you ever wondered what it's like to live on $1.50 a day? That question was in the message line of a recent e-mail from a friend. There I found a link to a poverty awareness project called Live Below the Line.

From May 7-11, CARE, a humanitarian organization working to end global poverty, is partnering with Live Below the Line – a campaign to change the way people in the U.S. think about extreme poverty. Live Below the Line is an initiative of the Global Poverty Project started in 2009 in Australia. It’s an education and campaigning organization whose mission is to increase the number and effectiveness of people taking action against extreme poverty.

The campaign’s strategy is to give a glimpse into the lives of the 1.4 billion people who live in extreme poverty by challenging individuals to live on $1.50 a day for food and drink for five days. The challenge is set at $1.50 a day because this is the current equivalent of the World Bank’s International Extreme Poverty Line. And for people who live in extreme poverty, that $1.50 has to cover far more than food and drink. That’s the U.S. equivalent of the money they have daily to pay for everything – health care, housing, transportation, clothing, education and more.

I won’t be accepting the Live Below the Line challenge the first week of May, but I’m aware of the power of such efforts. The stories and statistics on the websites of participating organizations are sobering. They’re far from my reality, so different from the abundance and comfort of my life. I’ve carried the images in my mind ever since receiving my friend’s e-mail, and they’ve reminded me of other times I’ve had heightened awareness of the violence of poverty.  

One memory is from my first trip to Nicaragua, chaperoning a group of high school students on a service/learning trip.  One day as we dug a hole for an incinerator at a medical clinic, an airplane flew overhead. The Nicaraguan man we were working with looked up at the plane and asked, “How much did it cost you to fly here?” We told him our tickets were about $600 each.

“That’s how much I make in a year,” he said, simply.

That evening, I listened to the students debrief their day. I knew how hard they all had worked to raise money for their trip expenses and what a stretch it was for many of their families to cover the costs.  Until then, none of them saw themselves as wealthy. Discovering that their plane tickets alone would use up an entire year of income for a man they’d worked with all day was a powerful economics lesson.

I don’t have to go to Nicaragua to find poverty, though. Even in my prosperous county, it’s evident that many here struggle financially. Paper grocery bags line the hall outside my school nurse office. During the week, staff fill them with boxes of dry cereal, canned soup, and pasta. On Friday, kids on the free lunch program cart the bags home to avoid hunger on the weekend. Many gardeners in my community participate in a  “Grow-a-Row” program to share produce with people in need, and many others depend on the local food bank and fresh food pantry to feed their families.  

For me, the Live Below the Line awareness campaign is a signal to discern anew what more I might do toward ending poverty. One Quaker organization doing good work to alleviate poverty in India, Kenya, and Sierra Leone is Right Sharing of World Resources. I’m grateful to those who are called to this work and remain open to ways I might serve.

Tax Day Blues

Flyer prepared by
 Friends Committee on
National Legislation

Today’s deadline to file federal income tax has me in a foul mood.  Not because I’m sweating getting the return in the mail by midnight tonight; my spouse and I filled out everything weeks ago and are even awaiting a small refund.  What’s bothering me today, as it does every time I hear about the federal budget, is how my government spends those dollars withheld from my paycheck each month. 

Since 2001, military expenditures have more than doubled, now up to $1.6 trillion. That’s a number I can’t imagine, and maybe you can’t either. Organizers of today’s Second Annual Global Day of Action on Military Spending (http://demilitarize.org/featured/video-figure-cost-save-world/) helped me visualize it in their video Go Figure - What Would It Cost to Save the World?. The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) helps put these figures in perspective, too, with their breakdown in Where Do Our Income Tax Dollars Go? Here’s how our nation spent each dollar of federal income tax we paid in 2011:

•                39¢: Pentagon spending for current & past wars

•                20¢: Health care

•                16¢: Responding to poverty

•                12¢: General government

•                9¢: Supporting the economy

•                3¢: Energy, science and environment

•                2¢: Diplomacy, development and war prevention.

I’ve fretted and fumed about this for years, watching the percentage of the federal budget spent on war rise. The Quaker Peace Testimony calls me to oppose and refuse to engage in war and violence. Although I strive for peace in my daily interactions, I’m complicit with these preparations for war by all of those 39¢ payments I’ve paid.  They add up to lots of death, destruction, and diversion of resources.

According to the National Priorities Project, taxpayers in my county paid $4.9 million for Afghanistan war spending this year. The Project’s Cost of War Tradeoffs website calculates a few things that money could have bought in 2011 here in my community:

·        67 elementary school teachers

·        527 Head Start slots

·        1775 households converted to all solar energy

·        631 scholarships for university students

·        1044 people receiving low-income health care.

For some years I acted on the Peace Testimony by withholding a percentage of my taxes owed comparable to the portion spent on war, or by refusing to pay the phone tax (previously used to fund military costs). This year, as last (thanks to guidance from the Pay Under Protest Campaign organized by Quaker war tax resisters in California), I’ll send a letter to my congressman and senators letting them know I’ve paid my taxes under protest.

And this year, I took action through the FCNL website to urge my senators to stay diligent in decreasing the Pentagon budget (FCNL Action Alert). I hope you’ll do the same.

I have a hard enough time juggling my household finances; imagining changing federal spending can make me feel helpless. Today, I’m remembering that many voices are calling for reform, for expenditures that nurture rather than destroy. If you feel the Tax Day Blues too, join the chorus for change.  Here are a few more sources of strength and hope:

http://fcnl.org/resources/newsletter/marapr12/the_federal_budget_a_moral_choice/

National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee

Former Costa Rica President and 1987 Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias speaks about how Costa Rica, without an army, has invested public resources in the public interest - http://demilitarize.org/general/nobel-laureate-scar-arias-gdams-power-demilitarization/

Afterthought #3 - Two-Dimensional Tools

Detail of a friend's quilt

 "As a writer, I'm trying to represent a ten-dimensional world with a two-dimensional tool which is writing."

     ~ Junot Diáz   (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of  The Brief  Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

Isn’t that what all artists do? Some use the two-dimensional tools of words on a page, notes on a staff, or paint on a canvas. Others use three-dimensional tools of fabric, clay, wood, stone, steel, or glass. That’s what art does—it portrays and makes sense of the complexities, the multiple dimensions, of life.

Remembering Manzanar

Exclusion Notices (from NPS website)

Today, March 21, 2012, marks the 70^th anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners at Manzanar, a concentration camp in southern California. Grace Ito Coan, a member of Sacramento Friends Meeting, was among the U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry imprisoned there from 1942-1945. I wouldn’t have noted this day if not for Grace’s story, “Manzanar: Forever in the Past?” in the current issue of Western Friend. Her account put a personal face on a sad and painful time in U.S. history.

Manzanar was the first of ten camps authorized on February 19, 1942 when President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This action, in response to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, moved nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans into isolated relocation centers in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming as well as Manzanar.  

Grace Ito Coan writes of Manzanar’s transformation from a fruit-growing colony in Owens Valley on the east side of the Sierras to a desert when water was diverted to Los Angeles. After the government’s relocation order, that desert became home to 10,000 people in a  “…city one mile square, enclosed by barbed wire and guarded from towers by military police with search lights and guns pointed inward.”

Ansel Adams photo, 1943 - Manzanar Relocation Center from the Tower 

Often with less than a week’s lead-time, people were ordered to the temporary, tar paper-covered barracks. Grace describes, “…dust seeping through the knotholes and cracks. We were to sleep on metal cots, and we filled our mattresses with straw.”  She and thousands of others were forced from their homes, businesses, and communities simply because they were of Japanese ancestry. Nearly three-quarters of them were U.S. citizens.

I live on a thirty-square-mile island with about 2200 people. I try to imagine five times that number squeezed into an area about the size of our village center. I can’t. But Grace’s story in Western Friend and many more stories and images of Manzanar at a National Park Service website bring attention to a shameful time in history.

Although these imprisonments occurred years before I was born, I’m embarrassed by my limited knowledge of them. It wasn’t until I moved to Seattle and started attending University Friends Meeting (UFM) that I learned more of this history.

One of UFM’s founders, Floyd Schmoe, among others in the Meeting, kept these concerns before us. Schmoe’s son-in-law, Gordon Hirabayashi, had defied the government curfew and evacuation orders, calling them a gross violation of Constitutional rights. He was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned, and eventually appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the Supreme Court initially upheld his conviction, efforts to overturn it resumed in the 1980s, culminating in his judicial vindication in 1987 and redress for the victims of internment. Hirabayashi died earlier this year at age 94.

Each year, over 1,000 people from diverse backgrounds, including students, teachers, community members, clergy and former incarcerees, make a pilgrimage to Manzanar to commemorate the unjust imprisonment. This year’s pilgrimage also marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Manzanar National Historic Site. Dr. Mitchell Maki, the lead author of Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress, will give a keynote address on the topic, “Why Remember?” Grace’s story and her urgings that we remain vigilant so Manzanar never happens again give ample reasons to remember.  

The Western Friend article moved me to honor this anniversary.  The word anniversary is from the Latin anniversarius ‘returning yearly,’ from annus ‘year’ + versus ‘turning.’ Today, I’m turning my thoughts to Manzanar and Grace.

For more information about the pilgrimage, visit -http://blog.manzanarcommittee.org/category/manzanar-pilgrimage/

Other resources about the internment:

http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/index.html

http://afsc.org/story/celebrating-life-and-work-gordon-hirabayashi