Pages tagged "Protest"

Dear Western Friend: In the time since I wrote the article about my frivolous filing penalty with the IRS, there have been some new developments. I would like to share the end of the story. I thought it had ended in August of 2012 when I agreed to pay a $500 penalty instead of the $5000 penalty. I was blue about this, but did feel that it was the best decision considering the situation. It turned out that the $500 had already been taken along with an extra $200 from our daughter's college fund. So the IRS owed me $200. I kept looking in the mailbox for it, and my partner Tim kept laughing.

Susan Estep is a founding member of All Against the Haul, an environmental action coalition supported by Friends in Montana. It was formed to stop the construction of a permanent industrial corridor for massively oversized loads of oil production equipment – longer-than-a-football-field megaloads – through Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana to the Alberta Tar Sands mine. Susan spoke by phone with Western Friend on October 23, 2014. Following are edited excerpts from a transcript of that interview.

Part of my dad’s job with the American Friends Service Committee was to take speakers around to various college campuses, churches, and summer institutes. As a kid, I sometimes went along and got to meet such spiritual giants as peace activist A.J. Muste and civil rights leaders Bayard Rustin and Ralph Abernathy. During spring vacation in 1956, my dad decided to take my brother Paul and me to Montgomery, where the bus boycott was four months old.

As a religion major at Drake University in the 1980s, my field studies took me to worship with nearly every denomination in Des Moines. One experience that kept drawing me back was the local Quaker Meeting, where I appreciated the overt commitment to justice and the inner sense of peace.

Currently immigrant youth are characterized as either angels or demons: angels who are valedictorians and student body presidents or criminals who are gang members, coyotes, or drug runners.

If war is not the answer, what is? David Hartsough’s Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist can help an uncertain reader progress to a firm conviction that effective nonviolent means of overcoming aggression and injustice really can be discovered and applied even in extreme situations – and that we “ordinary people” can do this. What makes the book so compelling is that it is an account of the author’s direct experience as an organizer and trainer in nonviolent campaigns, and as a participant in grassroots movements around the world.

Dear Friends: The FGC Gathering this year (6/29 –7/5) will be conveniently located near Appalachia, Ohio, and the headquarters of PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. PNC is the #1 funder of fracking in Pennsylvania. Ohio is an important state for PNC in terms of its depositors.

Dear Friends: It’s tax time, again, as we move towards April 15 with so much uncertainty in the future of this country and around the world. As a Quaker and war tax resister, I’ve appreciated the good works and financial support provided for resisters through the War Tax Resisters’ Penalty Fund (WTRPF).

Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Cheoweth and Maria J. Stephan