Last Spring, I was at a Middle School Track Meet when a fight between two students suddenly broke out behind me. As I turned around, one of the teammates pulled the aggressor off the student who was getting pummeled.
I was so relieved.
I was the only male adult in the immediate area, and so I felt a responsibility to stop this, but I didn’t want to. This wasn’t anyone I knew, it wasn’t my kid’s school, and I was there to cheer my sons as they raced. I didn’t want to get in the middle of any mess.
Cleaning up a mess is costly. And I didn’t want to pay the cost.
It reminds me of a quote from Madam Secretary, “Peace is beautiful. Making peace, not so much.”
True peace can not be bought on a discount. Peace is always costly. Many of us can settle for “peace”- the absence of apparent conflict instead of “Peace”- the presence of true community.
Truth be told, I’d rather write about peace than make it. I’m not great at difficult conversations. I like things to be resolved quickly in less than 30 minutes like an episode of Full House (with some musical accompaniment for dramatic effect). But peace is messy and costly, and someone has to pay the cost.
One of the things that worries me about our inability and unwillingness to have meaningful dialogue in our polarized world is that we all pay an inward, emotional cost as we walk on eggshells, make assumptions, and speculate and judge others and ourselves.
This build-up leads to an explosion that explodes all over like a shaken 2 liter of Pepsi. I think this is part of the source of riots. Martin Luther King Jr. described riots as the “language of the unheard.”1 In our own lives, it may be when we blow up at a spouse, a sibling, or a child. In the collective, it often looks like a riot.
Peace is a courageous act of moving towards people when moving away is easier and, in the moment, preferable. That’s a hard word for weary souls, but the alternative is actually much worse.
Love,
Aaron
He obviously understood why riots happened AND he advocated for non-violent forms of protest. When I see riots, I think it’s important to try to understand the source/reason of the pain AND to say that violence is not the best course of action.