What does all this math add up to? Simply that the Quaker testimonies for an end to legal slavery, for peace and women’s equality were not fads or pastimes for dilettantes. They were dead-serious, hundred year projects–and in the case of war, a century was just for starters.

You might think, given this recurrent pattern, that Quakers would be used to taking a long view. But by and large I believe you’d be mistaken, especially if you saw how the military does it. For instance, we’ve already seen that the military is thinking in terms of an "American century." They’re planning decades ahead, getting ready to stop even potential adversaries from challenging its supremacy. The plans may be madness and folly, but they’re making them.

But the long view for them also includes the past as well as the future. Each service has a corps of professional historians, and it’s a sure bet that some of them are already at work in Iraq, gathering data and interviews on the latest U.S. war. They’ll write thick books recounting and analyzing it in detail, comparing and contrasting it to other wars, ancient and modern.

This is not new, by the way; it’s a venerable tradition. Their big books are not widely read outside military circles, and maybe because of that they tend to be hard-hitting and candid. That’s because their purpose is not propaganda, but to help the military learn from past experience what worked and what didn’t, and which leaders and units performed well or badly, and why or why not–all so they can do it better next time. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Now, what of Quakers–how do we compare in this area? Well, the results of my own unsystematic but ongoing research are not encouraging. Here’s a typical case: a few weeks ago I gave a short quiz to a group of about 30 active Friends. I wrote three lists of names on the blackboard: one list was of some moderately notable American generals; the second was of some central figures in Quaker peace witness. I’ll get to the third list in a minute.

The names on the first list, the generals, were familiar, at least vaguely, to many of us. This didn’t surprise me; after all, to get more mileage out of all those big history books, the military has built or helped stock more than 300 military museums in this country, plus many more war memorials. We can easily skip reading the military’s books, but it’s hard to avoid the museums and memorials, or at least the signs for them.

In our quiz, when we moved on to the list of Quaker names, almost nobody recognized any of them. One name on the list was Lewis Fry Richardson – he was the Quaker who invented the field of peace research; he’s the Isaac Newton of that field. Nobody there had heard of him.

That we didn’t know the Quaker names didn’t surprise me either – Friends have been witnessing for peace in this country for more than 340 years. There are a handful of books about it. But how many Quaker peace memorials are there?

Almost none, unless you count the Mary Dyer statues. And the only peace museum in all of America that I know of, is here in Illinois, up in Chicago. I visited it once, thought it was wonderful, and wished there were more.

Think about that for a minute; 300 for war, 1 for peace, and none for Quaker peace work. But why not? There’s plenty of Quaker material: in Pennsylvania, for instance, during what William Penn called his "Holy Experiment," he and his successors managed to keep peace with the natives for seventy years, from 1680 to 1750, without an army. No other American colony had a record that came anywhere close. But is there a museum which illustrates and celebrates this Quaker peace landmark? Or any of the others down the centuries, of which there are many? Not a chance. How many of us even know about this?

So what do we Friends have instead of a sense of our history, or a long view of our future?

That’s where the third list in the blackboard quiz came in. It turned out all of us knew all the names on that list. Here are only three: Bob Edwards, Scott Simon, Susan Stamberg. In other words – and this is a demographic characteristic I’ve verified lots of time with unprogrammed Quaker groups – instead of a common history, we have a common radio network; today we’re not Hicksites or Orthodox anymore; we’re the NPR Quakers.

What’s my knock on this? After all, I too listen to NPR, almost every day. It’s simply this: when we’re more familiar with broadcast personalities than we are with our own heritage and its implications, then too many of us are caught up in a media culture that reinforces in us an atomized, moment-to-moment, ahistorical kind of consciousness which is the very antithesis of a long-term view and coherent strategizing.

What’s the result of being so "embedded": in this media culture? It’s not only that it purveys lots of misinformation and lies. It also dissipates our attention, helps scatter and diffuse our energy, and narrows our horizons.

Some of us may think we’re beyond that because we take in Talk of the Nation instead of Rush Limbaugh. But my Friends, that’s like thinking we’re not part of the petroleum economy because we drive our Volvos and Odysseys instead of Hummers. Who are we kidding? A preoccupation with the media, even the best, trains us to see an ever-changing parade of trees, while missing the forests, or the earth beneath them. And the American mass media, yes even NPR and PBS, are also extremely parochial: it’s almost all about us: America and Americans, the rest of the world is chronically presented in relation to us.

This learned self-centeredness is especially troubling in relation to war: Several million Congolese are killed in a decade-long civil war; but few Americans are among the casualties, and what do we know about it? the Liberian civil war has gone on for years; but this summer it’s on the screen, because the US embassy was shelled. Colombia, Chechnya, and many other equally horrendous wars drag on, and by and large we hardly notice.

Is this an exaggerated view of the overall state of American Quaker consciousness? Maybe. But another poll I frequently take among Friends is to ask how many in a group have been to a meeting or a protest about Iraq in the past year, and consistently almost every hand goes up. Then I ask who’s been to a similar meeting or protest about the Congo, or Sudan, or Colombia, and the hands are very few.

Why is that? Can it really be that the Spirit, That of God, the Light of Christ Within, wants Quakers to see the world from this same, America-centered perspective as the U.S. media? I don’t believe it. And this leads me to ask, how much of our peacework is Spirit-led, and how much of it is media-driven?