Spirit-led, versus media-driven; that’s a distinction worth pondering, I think. It’s also why I very much admire those Friends who are the glaring exceptions to this rule, who like David Zarembka of St. Louis Meeting has focused on the Great Lakes region of Africa, where horrible wars and slaughter took place not long ago, and which are now off the media radar screens, where they were featured only briefly anyway.

When so many of us end up knowing more about All Things Considered than about what worked and what didn’t in Friends’ epic struggle against slavery, or the other long term Quaker testimonies, I fear we’ve traded in a precious birthright for a collection of coffee mugs and tote bags.

Let me come at this another way: Suppose the US Army’s generals got the bulk of their military knowledge from daily news broadcasts, and hardly any of them knew who Stonewall Jackson was, and how he outsmarted the Union army, or why all of Hitler’s Panzer tank divisions couldn’t stop George Patton in Europe? What would happen to their brigades and battalions when these men led them into battle?

Similarly, if we don’t work diligently and deliberately to overcome that atomizing media conditioning, as Quaker peace workers we’re cooked. The only "Lamb’s War" we’ll be good for is a Hundred-MINUTE Lamb’s War, if that.

The Quaker women and men I have known who were giants of peace witness, were very different from each other, but they had one important thing in common: on their issue, on their concern, they knew what the hell they were talking about. Whether it was the Law of the Sea Treaty, or how to build a sanctuary movement to save central American refugees from the Reagan administration’s covert wars, or even advising antiwar GIs on how to get safely out of the country, they knew their stuff. And they didn’t attain this depth and credibility from 5-minute news reports. It took work, experience, study, and time, not to mention courage, worship, and spiritual strength.

I think we all know this too, at least in the back of our minds.

The same thing goes for looking forward and thinking strategically, planning a Hundred-Year Lamb’s War. Can we figure out where we want to be in twenty or fifty years, and plan realistically to get there, or at least be headed continually in the right direction? I believe that’s what we are called to do.

To this end, along with reading Lucretia Mott’s letters this spring, I also read a Marine Corps strategy manual. I wanted to begin to get a sense of what this kind of thinking might mean. And one thing it means is setting several levels of goals, based on realistic analyses of ourselves and our history, our strengths, weaknesses, and various other factors– and doing the same thing with our adversaries.

At the highest level, this yields grand strategy. That’s what we saw in the White House National Security Strategy: to maintain American preeminence, while we remake the world, by squashing any real or imagined rival. For Lincoln in the Civil War, as I understand it, the grand strategy was similarly straightforward: blockade the Confederate states along the coast, split them in two down the Mississippi river, and then starve or crush their forces one chunk at a time. And that’s more or less how it worked out, though of course real wars are never that neat.

Under the umbrella of grand strategy come operational goals, the major plans for achieving the grand strategic objectives. An example of this is what Colin Powell said about Saddam Hussein’s army in the first Gulf war – do you remember? he said: "First we're going to cut it off, then we're going to kill it."

I won’t have much to say about operational goals tonight, even though that’s where the sexy stuff is, when some get arrested or take other dramatic risks. I’m going to pass by all that, mainly for lack of time, and out of respect for the limits of your ability to sit and listen to me talk. Anyway they will have to be hammered out in a broad, ongoing discussion, from which an informed consensus can emerge. I’ll only note in passing that it will be a mistake to think that the most important of such goals is the next election. This essentially continuous horserace will increasingly be an obsession in the media for the next year or so, and if it becomes ours as well, then we’ll still be lost in the wilderness. Instead, I hope we can begin to approach that election from the perspective of a Hundred-Year Lamb’s War. Then, no matter which way it turns out, we’ll find more opportunities, and sustain hope.

My Friend Lucretia Mott comes back to mined here. In the 500-plus pages of her letters that I read spanning fifty years, Lucretia only rarely referred to elections, though she was a wel-informed, keen eyed and sharp-tongued observer of public events and trends. I’m not entirely sure why she was so quiet about politics, but I suspect in large part it reflected a clear long-term perspective: she fully expected that attaining equality for women would take a lifetime of labor, and even longer.

She was also clear that there were many ways of making social change, while presidents came and went. And she knew her Bible, too, so no doubt the verse about not putting our trust in princes was familiar to her. Or maybe it was just that she didn’t have the mass media to distract her.

For us today, I hope a concept like the Hundred-Year Lamb’s War may help us see the forest behind and encompassing the electoral trees. If it’s going to take at least that long to make any headway, wouldn’t some grand strategic concepts help us make the most faithful use of our limited resources?

I believe so. And I believe that taking a long-term view of our witness can help us overcome the disempowering effects of the moment-to-moment media fixation. This doesn’t mean we would give up on our beloved NPR – I’m not a fool; I know better than to ask Friends to do anything as drastic as that! But it can put the media in perspective, make them an asset for our larger work, instead of a distraction from and even a substitute for it.