Calling All Peacemakers - Your World Needs You Right Now
3 Strategies For Bringing Peace To Your Sphere Of Influence
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
“We realize that by trying to build a bridge between two sides, it means we might get walked on from both ends.”
— Toby Slough
What team are you on?
This is what the world wants to know right now.
You may have already abandoned social media.
You may have closed the valve to your daily news intake.
Perhaps you have even locked yourself in your home at this point with the blinds drawn.
You know that if you step out into the light — but choose to remain silent — everyone will say that you might as well have stayed hidden in the dark.
No matter your desire to fly at a high altitude, stay above the fray, and avoid the question from any direction it might pop up, the feeling remains.
The world wants you to pick a side right now more than ever.
Your choices are supposedly to either jump on a bandwagon with “The Left” and burn the world down until its prepared to start over — or pick up your assault rifle and bunker down with those on “The Right” to fight for the liberty of the good old days.
But secretly you are a part of a silent majority.
You know deep down in the marrow of your bones that this kind of question — this kind of partisan warfare — only results in a society that becomes its own form of punishment to itself.
You know the false premise of “choosing a side” forces our world to end up where we are today — on fire and with missiles hurling back and forth at “Right” or “Left” caricatures which do not really exist, or at least not in the majority, not in the way we would be led to believe, and not in our own personal spheres of influence we tend to experience day in and day out.
You know that anything that does exist is usually a consequence of an escalatory response to something perceived to have been shot out by “the other side.”
And you know those shots likely would not have been fired at all if everyone was not so determined go to a corner and defend it these days.
You refuse to perpetuate such a black and white way of viewing the world, because you not only see the shades of gray, you see in technicolor.
If this resonates — if your culture’s question seems inadequate to you — you might be a peacemaker.
Join me in a resistance movement.
I am here to lock arms with you and submit a third option for consideration:
Engage your world head on and wage heavy peace.