AT OUR SEPTEMBER GENERAL MEETING, QUAKER ACTIVIST and author George Lakey brought a lighthearted tone and infectious laugh to a serious topic: his 60-year fight for peace and justice spanning the Civil Rights movement, anti-war efforts during the 1960s, and more recent campaigns with Earth Quaker Action Team. George shared insights gleaned from this work, his Quaker faith, and his training as a sociologist – among them the importance of having a vision of the transformation you seek, and the need for being patient with the often slow pace of social change.
George learned the value of community early, he told us, when he and fellow peace activists felt called to sail a boat into South Vietnam with medical supplies for hospitals treating civilian victims of the Vietnam War. George consulted his Quaker community about the wisdom of putting his own life in danger this way when he had three young children depending on him. But his community affirmed that God was calling him to go, and they committed to care for his family if anything happened to him.
He described being beaten up multiple times and being confronted at knifepoint after “street speaking” against the war, using the incidents to show us the importance of teamwork, and explained how they reinforced his commitment to remain nonviolent. “Each time that I remember to remain nonviolent when I’m threatened, it strengthens me, it gives me power, and it builds in my own subconscious a kind of track record of memory and belief in myself, such that I can take on the next thing,” he told us.
He talked about the polarization our country is experiencing, and encouraged listeners to not fear conflict. “We never learn to do conflict well by avoiding it,” he pointed out, adding that this was a lesson he learned from his piano teacher, who said, “You’ll never learn to play the piano well by avoiding practice.” In addressing conflict, it is not necessary to engage with those who are most opposed to you, he explained, telling us to instead approach people in the middle – those who are “undecided, or are timid and cowed by the situation…and try to win them over to support you.”
THE BIGGEST PROFESSIONAL MISTAKE HE MADE as a sociologist, he went on, was thinking of polarization as a negative social factor that would inhibit progress. That idea was challenged when he studied the social progress achieved in Scandinavian countries, and learned that the advances had emerged a century ago when Nazis were marching in the streets and Scandinavian countries were in turmoil. Our own country made similar progress in the 1930s and 1960s, he reminded us – also times of social unrest.
George said he found the key to this apparent contradiction when visiting a Quaker sculptor in England. The artist showed him the forge where he heats the metal to the point that he can transform it into whatever shape he wants, and that was George’s “aha moment.”
“Man, you saved my brain,” he told the sculptor. “That’s the metaphor I’ve needed! Polarization is a blacksmith forge, heating a society and making it possible for people to make major advances that they in other periods of time cannot make. Whoa!”
George documents that revelation in his book Viking Economics and warns that polarization in our country may increase in coming years. Yet he is hopeful that such conflict will ultimately lead to progress, as it did in Scandinavia. Still he cautions that successful social movements need a vision of the society they want to see, and cannot just complain about what they don’t like.
DURING THE Q&A PERIOD FOLLOWING THE TALK, a participant asked George about the difficulty of changing large capitalist institutions such as the banks that Third Act targeted on 3.21.23 and Summer of Heat. In his response, George stressed the importance of choosing a target that is winnable. He recounted the efforts of the Earth Quaker Action Team, which he co-founded, to lobby PNC Bank to stop funding mountaintop-removal coal mining. They started small, sitting on the lobby floor and worshiping in a few banks in one state, then expanded until they were holding simultaneous worship at banks in 13 states. They also disrupted a shareholder meeting by holding their own meeting at the same time and place, having purchased enough shares to be there. The effort took five years, but eventually PNC agreed to stop funding the destructive mining practice.
At a time when many people fear for the future of our country, listeners were buoyed by George’s optimism born of long experience and his analysis about the slow pace of change. As he reminded us in his closing words, “We’re in it together, and we can do together what we can’t do alone.”
To hear George describe these experiences in his joyful, engaging way – including how bank managers responded to Quakers worshiping in their bank lobbies and what PNC shareholders did when demonstrators began to sing “This Little Light of Mine” – listen to the recording of the full meeting on our YouTube channel.
In an excerpt from George’s memoir, Dancing with History: A Life for Peace and Justice, read how George describes the obstacles he and other activists encountered when they sailed into a war zone with medical aid during the Vietnam War. A documentary about his life is due out in November.