By Meghan Conley
I was recently honored to receive the 2018 Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance Peacemaker Award, alongside four other women who work for peace in our community.
The truth is, though, that I find it very hard to feel like a peacemaker these days. I find it hard to understand what it means to make peace during these times of war. And I do feel that we are at war right now—we are at war over ideas, values, and meaning. And maybe we always have been. A few years ago, Ai-Jen Poo, of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, said that “we are in the fight of our lives for the soul of this country.” I believed that then and I believe it even more strongly today.
In my work with AKIN, I wake up every day and bear witness to this war. Not as someone directly affected, because I am one of the privileged few who through no fault or doing of my own happened to be born in the United States. No, I bear witness as a bystander to the chaos of our immigration system, to its indifference to pain and suffering, and to the injustices of a global system built on vulnerability, exploitation, and racism.
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