The Choice between Compassion and Cruelty

Every day, in ways large and small, we are confronted with a choice. Sometimes it arrives quietly—a story in the news, a neighbor in need, a policy proposal buried in legislative text. Sometimes it crashes into our lives with unmistakable force: someone suffering, someone targeted, someone pushed to the margins once again.

In those moments, the question is the same:
Will we default to compassion, or to cruelty?

Cruelty is easy. It asks nothing of us but our silence. It thrives when we look away. It disguises itself as pragmatism, toughness, “the way things are.” It is a force that narrows our world until other people’s pain becomes weightless, distant, or deserved. And history shows us—again and again—what happens when cruelty becomes policy: families shattered, rights stripped, communities terrorized, democracy hollowed out from within.

Compassion, by contrast, is deliberate. It requires attention. It requires willingness. It asks us to recognize that the people who suffer are not abstractions or inconveniences but human beings with stories and worth. Compassion expands the world; it reminds us that our fates are linked and that dignity is not a scarce resource to be rationed.

To choose compassion is not to be naïve or weak. It is to stand firmly in the belief that justice is possible, that harm is not inevitable, and that our shared humanity matters more than anyone’s hunger for power. Compassion is courage, practiced daily.

Right now, across this country, cruelty is being marketed as a governing philosophy. Policies that rip apart families, target the vulnerable, erase whole communities, and punish the poor are not accidents—they are choices. And so our choices matter too.

When we see suffering, do we turn the page?
When we see injustice, do we rationalize it?
When we see leaders wield cruelty as a weapon, do we shrug, or do we resist?

We cannot control every event, but we can control our response. And in a time when cruelty is becoming organized, compassion must become organized too.

The future will be shaped by the choices we make in moments exactly like these. May we choose the path that widens the circle, eases the burden, and affirms the humanity of those who have been told they are expendable.

May we choose compassion. Every time.

When faced with the suffering and injustice in our path, will we default to compassion or to cruelty?

Caring about the 'Least of These'

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” It is a call to active compassion—a reminder that our faith is measured by how we treat the most vulnerable among us.

The sick, the hungry, and the poor are being brought to their knees by cuts to Medicaid,  and the SNAP program.

Latino communities no longer feel safe going to work, or even walking down the street.

Muslim families in America, long scapegoated by white Christian Nationalists, face renewed hostility and the threat of violence for their faith—despite the Constitution’s clear protections.

And the false claim that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion harm society has been amplified by Project 2025.  In truth, when those with privilege commit to equality, we all flourish.  A more just nation enriches everyone.

We can recognize our privilege in order to reflect soberly on those who have been pushed to the margins. In recent months, our social order has been jolted. Privileged white men have risen even higher in a shaken hierarchy, while many others have slipped further down.

Same-sex couples—those joyfully married and those longing to be—are unsettled as Christian Nationalists within Project 2025 openly contemplate dismantling their legal rights. Trans people are being written out of existence by policies that deny their identities, restrict their healthcare, and attempt to legislate them out of public life.

The Measure of a Nation Is How It Treats Its Most Vulnerable.

A Call to Conscience

From Friends Committee on National Legislation:

H.R. 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” is misleading in name. It marks the U.S. federal government’s deliberate rejection of the basic pillars that support strong communities: access to food, healthcare, economic opportunity, and responsible stewardship of our environment. We call on Congress to honor the Light within all of God’s creation and reject this path. 

The bill proposes the largest reduction to nutrition assistance in the nation’s history, punishing parents already navigating low wages, rising costs, and childcare gaps. Instead of relief, it offers a maze of bureaucratic red tape—just to feed their children. An estimated three million adults would lose this critical lifeline, and one million children would face a greater risk of hunger. And yet the bill offers nothing to ease the burden of working families. 

It rips health care from nearly 14 million people—many just above the poverty line, many already managing chronic illness. And the bill’s tax provisions favor those already thriving. Major investments indulge the war industry. Everyday people will shoulder the consequences.

Poverty is a calculated public policy decision.

Flowers at Meeting for Worship

Flowers are frequent attenders at Meeting for Worship. A vase of azaleas or buttercups or hyacinths garlanded with Queen Ann’s Lace or flocked with Golden Rod claims privilege of place on a table or ledge, where everyone can see it and hear it declaiming its truth. The language of flowers pertains as much to being as doing. It aspires and inspires, clear-eyed as a day’s-eye daisy. It’s a language Friends particularly want to listen to, to listen for, even to grow fluent in. Its syntax emanates in brilliant colorations. To see flowers speak is to hear them shine, and when a soul hears them it can’t help but see them true, the way Moses both saw and heard the great I am. When a table is bedecked with blossoms and trumpet bells, the eyes hear what they see, they follow its meaning. Every flower is a given flower, but most flowers come without tags, beaming at us, waving a little.  We want to know who the giver is.

Written by Terry Culleton

Corporations Lacking Responsibility

The Paradox of Corporate Personhood: Profits Over Principles

Mitt Romney's statement during a town hall, "Corporations are people, my friend," echoes a longstanding legal perspective stemming from a Supreme Court decision over a century ago that granted corporations the rights of personhood. This notion presents a profound societal contradiction.

Unlike humans, for-profit corporations inherently lack morality. Their single-minded focus is to maximize shareholder profit, often at the expense of ethical considerations. Consequently, a corporation does not inherently feel obliged to act morally, as would be expected of an individual.

For example, if a corporation's factory is causing harm to its neighbors, the entity is not compelled to alleviate those harms unless doing so would benefit its financial interests. This behavior parallels that of an amoral individual—one who lacks a moral framework and is indifferent to concepts of right and wrong. Such entities, devoid of ethical considerations, struggle to act responsibly within society.

This stark reality challenges us to reconsider the implications of corporate personhood, questioning whether entities driven by profit can truly fulfill the responsibilities of a moral person in our society.

Internet Potential Squandered

The Internet's Unfulfilled Promise: From Global Enlightenment to Misinformation

In the 1990s, the internet was heralded as a revolutionary force with boundless potential. It promised to democratize knowledge, facilitating the global exchange of wisdom, accelerating scientific discoveries, and fostering international peace.

However, the reality has fallen short of these lofty aspirations. Instead of becoming a tool for enlightenment, the internet has become a breeding ground for misinformation and propaganda.

Historically, it was thought that a common enemy might unite humanity, prompting collective action—even if that enemy were hypothetical extraterrestrials threatening our existence. Yet, when faced with the very real and existential threat of climate change, misinformation campaigns ramped up, undermining global efforts to tackle the crisis effectively.

The internet, once envisioned as a beacon of shared knowledge and unity, has instead played a role in clouding public understanding and hindering the collective action needed to address one of our most pressing global challenges.

One Book, One Meeting: Conservation that Starts in Your Yard

March update: Gwen Kerber’s Spiritual Exploration Group discussion of the book on the 16th will range from feelings that you have about what is happening in the natural world; loss of species, loss of natural spaces, can’t see the stars at night , – to anything in the book that really hit home for you in some way – something that made a light bulb go on, something that you were surprised by, upset by, empowered by. If you want to talk about your own feelings - your own lived experience is more than enough. no need to have read the book for that part of the discussion.

Here is a handout that provides some highlights of the book and the Homegrown National Park website.

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Roz and I traveled down to Philadelphia in June to see Marty Moss Coane interview Doug Tallamy on the subject of Creating Native Landscapes (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/creating-a-native-landscape-in-your-own-yard/id1667989249?i=1000659054568). The interview was “about the role we can play in restoring our shared environment by turning our backyards, no matter how small, into interconnected conservation corridors using native plants to attract bees and insects, especially pollinators.”

Doug was very informative and entertaining. See my index of the interview below.

He also has a book: Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard by Douglas W. Tallamy.

This book could help the Meeting to define what we want to do for Earth Day and the steps we want to take more generally to make our Meeting campus more sustainable. We’ve gotten on the right path, but I think we have a long way to go regarding the care of our grounds. Some things Doug Tallamy talks about that we can strive for, given the will, are:

• the less mowing we talked about in our clerks team meeting and managing it carefully such that we eliminate/minimize undesirables, especially invasive plants;

• augment our new meadow areas with seed mixes for drought-tolerant native grasses;

• add pollinator friendly flowers like goldenrod, asters, sunflowers, violets, evening primrose, and native willows to our meadows;

• create areas where we don’t collect the leaves;

• create educational opportunities for Nursery School and our hoped-for FDS about ecosystems and insects.

Memorable moments of the Marty Moss Coane interview Doug Tallamy interview:

00:00 — 03:00 Introduction

“There's millions of us. So that's millions of future conservationists.”

“… the world is gonna end if we do nothing”

06:30 — How does a well-functioning ecosystem work?

11:00 — Most people think that nature is someplace else.”

14:15 — Pesticides and herbicides

15:08 — Relationship with invasives and their berries.

16:50 — Trouble is birds rear their young on insects not berries.

17:30 — Killing our birds from all different angles.

18:00 — A nice big circle of leaf litter around a tree for caterpillars to fall into.

18:50 — Clover rather than grass; no-mow areas “with a sequence of blooming plants that our pollinators need from April all the way to the end of October”

19:40 — Pollinator gardens with “goldenrods, native asters, evening primrose, perennial sunflowers, anything in the genus Helianthus”

20:45 — The problem with honeybees… hobbyists are hurting the native bee population, i.e., the pollinators we need to save.

21:30 — The Oak tree… productive vs non-productive plants.

24:00 — Getting 127 species of birds to visit 1/10 of an acre using beautiful native plants

25:04 — Everybody has to be involved… visit the homegrownationalpark.org website, and “look at the section about container gardening, you can now find the appropriate native plants for containers in your eco region, anywhere in the country, to try to empower people who think they can't do anything.”

25:48 — Research about health benefits of exposure to nature.. shows it can lower your blood pressure and your stress hormone.

26:50 — Nature’s resilience.

28:57 — A weed is plant out of place… call it Monarch’s delight instead of milkweed and everyone will want it.

22:50 — lights

“We need pollinators more than they need us.”

33:25 — Doung’s critique of the Endangered Species Act: it focuses on one species at a time rather the whole web.

Kim Kardashian is the biggest water abuser in California and she’s proud of it… we need to change the culture.

35:51 — The destructive problem of deer.

32:32 — Ten Step Program: “Take 10 steps back from your trees, and all your insect problems disappear… don't think of them as caterpillars. Think of them as bird food. If you have a plant that's making zero bird food, get another plant.”

42:00 — HOAs.

45:55 — Ticks

49:15 — Roundup/herbicides.

49:05 — Use electric lawn equipment… not gas-powered leaf blowers.

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From The Connection with Marty Moss-Coane: Creating a Native Landscape in Your Own Yard, Jun 14, 2024

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/creating-a-native-landscape-in-your-own-yard/id1667989249?i=1000659054568&r=215

This material from the interview may be protected by copyright.

Strengthening our Meeting through Service

Friends Journal had a query recently: When you look around our Meetinghouse, do you see a community zealous for good deeds?

The answer for me is yes, I do see members and attenders who want to do the right thing. (Recent evidence is our approval for the solar and geothermal projects.) We are known to the larger community by our acts of service, our commitment to peace, our seeking truth, and our dedication to one another—but to keep that spirit alive, we must also be mindful of how the work gets done.

For me, belonging to a community like Wrightstown Friends Meeting is a force multiplier—together, we can accomplish far more than we ever could as individuals. But to achieve the goals of our hearts, we need to recognize that our work is carried forward by our committees.

Right now, we are facing a challenge. Our Peace and Social Concerns Committee, which has long been at the heart of our outward-facing good works, has been laid down—not because the work is no longer needed, but because there wasn’t enough interest to sustain it. This should give us pause. If we want to be a Meeting that acts on our values, we must be intentional about ensuring that the work continues. Casual participation won’t get us there.

As we consider the future of our Meeting, we must ask ourselves:

• What do we want to accomplish as a community?

• Which committees support those goals?

• How do we match our aspirations with a willingness to serve?

There is a growing disconnect between what we believe ourselves to be—a Meeting that actively pursues good works—and our willingness to engage in the committee work that makes those goals possible. To bridge that gap, we need more of us to step forward.

I invite you to reflect on where your gifts and passions lie and consider joining a committee. This is how we sustain the work, how we uphold our values, and how we ensure that Wrightstown Friends remains a vibrant, engaged force for good in the world.

In service and community,

Jeff Cogshall
Clerk, Wrightstown Friends Meeting

Aspirations Abandoned

I’ve heard it argued that withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement is a gesture of honesty—an acknowledgment that we are far from meeting our commitments. But such a move doesn’t reflect honesty; it reflects surrender. To walk away is to abandon our aspiration to save the planet from the devastating effects of climate change.

Failing to meet a goal should drive us to do better, not justify quitting altogether. Withdrawing from the agreement simply because we are falling short is no different than scrapping Constitutional amendments on civil rights because we have yet to achieve full racial and gender equality. Progress isn’t made by abandoning commitments—it’s made by striving to fulfill them.

Thinking Globally and Acting Locally about Peace as well as Stewardship

This time of year brings an amplification of the “Peace on Earth” message, or perhaps it’s that the usual sounds of aggression feel a little more subdued. Yet, as we look around the world, the picture can seem bleak for those yearning for a more peaceful future.

In our efforts to embrace environmental stewardship, we never imagined we could solve global warming on our own. Instead, we committed to doing our part—small but meaningful steps toward a larger goal.

The same principle applies to peace. We may not be able to end global conflict, but we can do our part. By fostering a sense of peace and connection within our Meeting, we strive to create a peaceful oasis amidst a turbulent world.