This past weekend was the annual
conference of the Friends Committee on
National Legislation.
Veteran Quaker activists on
peace issues and other issues of intense social concern had come to a
conference center in Washington DC from all
around the US. I have gotten to know quite a few members of FCNL’s
national headquarters staff in the months I’ve had the affiliation of
“Friend in Washington” with them; and of course, from my home Quaker
meeting (congregation) back home in Charlottesville Virginia, I’ve had
one small grassroots view of how FCNL operates. But what was new and
energizing this weekend was to experience this critical mass of engaged
social-activist energy all in one place at one time.
I heard many great stories of what FCNL’s mainly– but by no means
exclusively– Quaker supporters have been doing around the country:
contacting their members of Congress; writing to local papers;
organizing peace vigils; working on pro-green projects; delving deep
into the challenges of peacemaking and peacebuilding; etc, etc.
The keynote speaker, on Saturday night, was Congressman John Lewis
(D- Georgia), who was honored with FCNL’s Edward F. Snyder Award for
National Legislative Leadership in Advancing Disarmament and Building
Peace. Lewis was born in 1940 in Troy, Alabama, the son of
African-American sharecroppers. At a young age he became one of
the historic leaders of the US civil rights movement. When he was
23 he was the head of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), and in that capacity he was one of the speakers at the
important “March on Washington” along with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
He told us that he had been just 17 when, as a student at the
historically Black Fisk University in Knoxville, Tennessee, he first
made the acquaintance of Quakers, who were organizing workshops on
nonviolent social action in a nearby church. He started
participating in the workshops which, he said, moved him very deeply.
Soon enough, he and his colleagues from Fisk and elsewhere in the
still-segregated south started a campaign of going to sit down at
“Whites Only” lunch counters:
people would come up and spit on us, or put lighted cigarettes in our
hair or down our backs. And we wouldn’t react. We wouldn’t
get angry. We kept our
eyes on the prize.
Lewis has been a member of the
US House of Representatives since 1987 and the senior chief deputy
whip in the Democratic caucus since 1991. He has been a
consistent and strong voice in the anti-war caucus in Congress, too.
He told us on Saturday,
war in Iraq and the prospect of military engagement in Iran.
These would both be wars of choice, not of necessity.
… Sometimes I feel like crying out loud for our nation, for what the
administration has done in our name!
He recalled the occasion when he and Dr. King spoke to the March on
Washington. And he said,
Luther King’s speech there that day: the ‘I have a dream’ speech.
But we don’t hear nearly enough about the important speech
he made at Riverside Church in New York City, just a year before he
died, in which he spoke out against the Vietnam war and said the US was
the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
If he could speak here tonight, he would tell us that war is not the answer; war is
obsolete.
Seeing and listening to this historic figure was incredibly
inspiring. Lewis had a wonderful, down-to-earth charm. At
one point, he recalled the time he had spent in his youth helping his
parents raise chickens– and how even as a boy he had gathered the
chickens and some of his younger cousins together in the hen-house, and
practised “preaching” to them. He commented,
listened better to me in those days than my colleagues in Congress
listen to me
today… and some of them were a lot more productive. At least they
laid eggs!
… On the Friday night David
Goldstein, an energy-efficiency expert with the Natural Resources Defense
Council gave a presentation to the conference about his new book, Saving Energy, Creating Jobs.
Goldstein has a doctorate in physics, but he’s spent many years now
also looking at the politics and economics of the effort to reduce
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, especially through
legislative/regulatory initiatives to increase the energy efficiency of
common household appliances.
He argued very persuasively against the claims of those who say that
legislating standards for energy efficiency is the wrong way to proceed
because the spirit of innovation within “the free market” is the best
way to work towards greater efficiency all round. Instead, by
showing a number of very convincing charts of time-series data over the
past 30-plus years, Goldstein showed that Clean Air legislation
introduced in California in the early 1970s had succeeded in increasing
energy efficiency considerably.
He started off by arguing that every $1 invested in energy
efficiency brings $3 in direct
energy savings and up to $30 in non-energy savings. “But then,” he
added, “very often you don’t even have to spend the extra $1 in the
first place, because the intense focus on innovation makes for
greater economic efficiency all round.”
He had a powerful critique of the limitations on the ability of
supposedly “free market” forces to respond to a challenge like that of
reducing greenhouse gas emissions, noting that what was described as
the “free market” was always anyway shaped by government actions,
imperfect knowledge, human irrationality, etc, and that the “free
market” arguments against a regulatory approach to increasing energy
efficiency was often simply a cover for deep economic conservatism: a
preference just to continue doing “business as usual.”
Regarding policy, he argued for the federal government’s
establishment of mandatory
declining GHG
emission caps. Noting that a large proportion of GHG
emissions in the US come from homes and other buildings, he said the
government should introduce a simple and informative labeling system
for buildings so that buyers, sellers, and other interested parties
would all know clearly what the energy-use specifications of a property
actually are. He also argued for much more focus on
location-efficient development, rather than the urban sprawl that so
many Americans now live in, that traps them in a deep dependence on
private cars.
He was also an inspiring and very informative speaker. Here by the way is the PDF version of his slides. Slides 4,5, and 9 are particularly clear and convincing. Slide 9 shows the degree to which, through legislating its own state-level requirements on energy standards, California has emerged as consuming significantly less energy per capita than the US average. (Also, since California’s population is around 8% of the national total, its reduction/stabilizationm of energy use has also brought the national average down lower than it would otherwise have been.)
Having Goldstein give one of
the two big evening speeches at this year’s conference is part of
FCNL’s growing focus on environmental issues.
Many of the people at the conference were men and women with decades
of experience– and the organizers had also made sure to bring in as
many younger Friends (Quakers) as possible. Over the years I’ve worked
with dozens of different social-activism organizations in various
contexts, and it seemed clear from this weekend’s
conference that FCNL, which was founded in 1943, has an experienced
network of both
staff members and grassroots activists, and decisionmaking
mechanisms that are marked by clarity and a sense of shared purpose.
During 2008, the organization will be undergoing its biennial
“priority-establishing” exercise, which it does with input from Quaker
bodies throughout the country. I guess finding a way to get the
troops out of Iraq, and to prevent a war with Iran, will still be high
on the agenda.
John Lewis is one of the finest people on the Planet. He has no agenda except truth and justice.
I wish we had more John Lewis’.
Jim Weaver
Quakerhood comes closest to what I believe…I never seem to make it to their spiritual gatherings…I wonder if the Quaker conference in fact carried out some assessment of their own impact as a lobbying force?