Every year in September, The Peace Alliance lobbies for a U.S. Department of Peace and asks supporters to call, visit, plan activities and send a virtual pie to members of the U.S. House and Senate. Being from D.C., I sent a pie to my non-voting representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, earlier. Hopefully, a “peace” of pie will ease the way to a more successful, happy productive America and world.
The week’s events were overtaken with the sorrow of the death of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, judge, lawyer, advocate for women’s rights, voting rights and equity for all regardless of race, color, creed and gender. The week was also followed by the grand jury proceedings of the police involved in the shooting of Breonna Taylor followed by national protest in response to the verdict. For peace with nonviolence, 2020, has been one rolling boulder, speeding nonstop amidst the flooding, forest fires on the West Coast, hurricanes, tornadoes and the normal but tumultuous presidential election intertwined with the pandemic of COVID-19, plus the white culture-shock awakening of strategic and systemic racism in the United States, as televised and digitized with the barbaric knee-lynching of George Floyd.
All of this is nothing new. These events have occurred before. The only difference this time is our societal awareness and the intolerance of the younger generation, as they prepare to protect, enhance and maintain a freer — and hopefully more peaceful — world.
Angie Whitehurst is an artist and vendor with Street Sense Media.
