Amid a sunny Saturday in a bustling Millennium Park buzzing with downtown shoppers and people posing for photos near the Cloud Gate sculpture, a small handful of Chicago Quakers used the warm afternoon for a silent vigil.
A group of about 10 members of the Religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, silently stood in a straight line between a busy Michigan Avenue and the tourist-thronged Bean in protest against war and violence. The organization is a movement with Christian ties that promotes peace, justice and equality.
The “Love as Action” vigil, organized by American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an international organization that supports peace and justice, was planned to take place in over 25 cities across the country this weekend.
Self-proclaimed pacifists, Chicago area Quakers are feeling increasingly frustrated with the current state of affairs, including the war in Iran and the federal mass deportation campaign.
“We don’t really believe we should be there right now,” said Kyran Esler, 34, a Northside Friends Meeting member, about U.S. military engagement in Iran and civilian harm. “There was no war in Iran a month ago…that’s a ton of dead civilians and a ton of people being harmed.”
According to the Associated Press, the death toll in the Middle East has risen to more than 1,300 people in Iran, more than 1,000 people in Lebanon, 15 in Israel and 13 U.S. military members, and a number of civilians on land and sea in the Gulf region. Millions of people in Lebanon and Iran have been displaced.
Saturday’s hour-long event was the fourth such anti-violence vigil, which organizers described as a form of peaceful prayer. Another one was at the downtown Christkindlmarket during a brutal January cold snap against anti-immigrant sentiment, Esler said.
Wearing psychedelic heart-shaped prescription glasses on a bright afternoon, Esler said he has been a part of the Quaker community since he could remember.
His mother, 76-year-old Beth Burbank, is a longtime Quaker and came out to support the vigil, carrying a poster in hand and a checkered keffiyeh — a Middle Eastern scarf and a modern symbol of colonial resistance — around her neck.
Burbank, a peace activist during the Vietnam War, said she was hopeful for the betterment of society following the conflict. “I honestly thought that for a while after the Vietnam War, I thought that we were actually getting better. People were fighting for justice, we were supporting antiracism, and as a country, we were getting better,” she said.
But in recent years, Burbank said she’s seen a regression toward racism and violence. “It was naive!” she said. “It’s been a very rude awakening to see how quickly things can turn around and hostility, anger, oppression and hate can just take over.”
Standing to her right, Thomas Draghi, a self-described “free-spirited atheist” and non-Quaker, who doesn’t attend protests, said he accepted a friend’s invite to the vigil to express his political frustrations over what he called the country’s “colonial maneuvering” and “militaristic activities” involving Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba.
“I’m not the type of person that comes down here,” said Draghi, 70, and a retired physician living in Oak Park. “I’m more of a person who seethes quietly by himself,” he laughed.
But these recent years have been frustrating, particularly this current administration, which was why Saturday was his second time attending the vigils. He compared the feeling of his frustrations to suffocation.
“You know when you’re a kid, and you read about boa constrictors, and they grab onto your chest,” he said. “Then you breathe out, and they tighten, and then you breathe out more, and they tighten more, and you can’t breathe in anymore.”
