Grace Ross: Walking The Walk For Peace

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Last Sunday for Mother’s Day I spent the early morning to mid-morning doing what I do every year I possibly can: walking with the mothers for peace. This is part of an amazing organization called the Lewis D. Brown Peace Institute which came about because of the wisdom and spiritual strength of mothers of those whose children were victims of youth violence. Tina who runs the place has found the transformative power of forgiveness in a way that few people ever do. She models forgiveness in its true strength that and continues to nurture that power with others in her community so often the home place of violence between our young people.

{A happy belated “Happy Mother’s Day” to all of the mothers out there – even those of us who may not have given birth to children of our own, but understand our role as parents to all of the children in our communities.}

Inevitably what flashes through my mind: standing with Women Together for our young people who have been killed here in Worcester – at the Peace Park on Winslow St., candles on Preston St., for a young mother on Southgate St. and more, unfortunately. Women Together was also brought together by some women that came together around a mother who lost her son to violence but who understood the need for a different solution, a community solution that will end forever the need for youth violence.

“Need” may seem like an odd word to use, but youth violence is a response to a lack of a community’s responsibility or, as the African Proverb says, the lack of the needed village to raise a child. Youth violence rises and falls along with the economy. It rises and falls along with what civic options are available for our next generation from public libraries and sports programs, to the rest of us believing in their future enough to encourage them towards it. We have lots of options in our lives, we get choices every moment about whether we choose paths that help reweave and rebuild our connections or whether we choose paths that ignore our natural connections to each other and allow destruction to fill the gaps that we leave open between us and others.

This year, I was honored to go to the Walk for Peace with my friend Christeen who was carrying with her the young people in her life that have been lost to violence in her heart. We got out early in the walk toward the front.

And then, when we reached the highpoint, we turned back to look. This year was miraculous: there were thousands and thousands of people in the street. What joy! Many more than there have ever been: It was like a warm wave through my body.

This walk is always an important spiritual act, an important act in support of the community, but to see what I believe must have been well more than double the number of folks we have ever had was amazing. This was a tribute not only to the ongoing work, but a tribute to the more important human commitment to community that flows through all of us and can be the source of incredible healing action in all our lives if we let it.

After we had walked over three miles and arrived back at Townsend Park in Dorchester I had the pleasure of standing at the chain linked fence and watching the thousands pour back into park as they completed their walk – every color, every stripe of life, and a true affirmation of life.

This is the present undercurrent – this mounting pressure from the grassroots towards a different choice in our lives, toward a different option of how to be with each. At some level, we have a responsibility to step in front of every train wreck that is coming down the pike – whether it’s continued cuts to basic civic programs, continued cuts to jobs and income or the degradation of our cities and towns as money continues to flow out through unrealistic mortgages, tax breaks for massive corporations and a million ways. The majority of political choices – that destroy our children’s future like job cuts, defunding public schools, not providing affordable accessible healthcare to all our children & their families, not enough summer youth jobs not to mention what we are doing to the environment – these policies send a message that we don’t care about each other or our kids or our future.

But that walk over 10,000 strong, more than double passed numbers made it clear: there’s a much more powerful force out there and that’s the power of us coming together. In the face of the escalation of violence that the Boston bombings were, in opposition to the hate-speech in response to those bombings, here was an outpouring of the peace we can be about.

These days, I need my days of hope like this past Mother’s Day. The images? I encourage you to see them posted of Africa American, Latino, Asian, white folks, all different backgrounds coming together to say: yes, we choose the path of forgiveness and healing, of peace, especially peace for the future of our young people.

Grace Ross is a former Gubernatorial candidate and author of Main St. Smarts.