As our community feels the painful consequences of violence, with an unidentified 16-year-old and UNC senior Eve Carson both being shot within walking distance of UNC's tree-lined, picturesque campus, it puts an added perspective on the five-year anniversary of the violence of the Iraq War.

As much as we are hurting, that day reminds us of violent deaths numbering more than 100,000, each of which leaves a family, a community suffering and grieving.

This is a day that implores us, those who have come face-to-face with violence in our community, to become champions for peace, to advocate for another way of being toward our neighbor, our community, our fellow nations and the planet that is struggling to support us.

I turn to two humble examples of the drive for peaceful, loving, trusting, equitable world that we all seek, expecting that their stories will inspire us to make peace the way of our hearts and lives.


The Peace Club at Chapel Hill High School

Sarah Jane Kerwin embraces being a little different. A freshman at Chapel Hill High School, she is troubled by the violence she sees around her. "It begins long before nations begin fighting other nations ... it is in the language we use, the racial and homophobic slurs around us, and the bullying we see in schools." Kerwin and fellow freshman Marina Ramos-Pezzati formed the Peace Club at their high school, advertising around the school with bottle tops turned into vestiges for peace, adorned with signs and phrases of peace. Says Kerwin, "I knew that other students cared about peace. I simply decided that instead of waiting for them to find me, I would find them."

Little more than six months old, the Peace Club, under the tutelage of world history teacher Corey Waters, has decided that embracing and cultivating a culture of peaceful relations among students was not enough and instead turned their focus to working on issues of injustices, in our community and beyond. Kerwin comments, "Justice and peace cannot be separated -- the best peace work we can do is to better our community, one person at a time." The Peace Club, now affiliated with O Ambassadors, groups of youth working for social change through Oprah. And on Thursday, they will be invited guests of Oprah, hoping to appear on the show itself. When asked for her vision for peace, Kerwin takes a deep breath, trying to put words to her life's mission. "It is easy to say that you want peace, but it is much harder to do something about it. I think that if people would just think before they act, whether it is an offensive word they are using, a way they are destroying the environment, or how we support violence through our silence, we could make peace a reality."


The Peace Pilgrim

The woman known as Peace Pilgrim offered the world a simple message as she hiked thousands of miles across the world: When we collectively nourish ourselves to find inner peace, our institutions will reflect that peace and war will be no more. She would not give her name or age, and would simply describe herself as coming from poverty, with little education and no special talents. "Rather, I live a guided life," she would say.

A small woman with incredible moral and spiritual strength, she used her legs over the course of 29 years (1953-1981) to make cross-country hikes for world peace, logging more than 25,000 miles. She would stop to speak the peace message, living simply and relying on others for food and shelter. When asked why war exists and how to turn it into peace, Peace Pilgrim echoed Kerwin's sentiments: "The real problem is immaturity [and] the key is approaching with love and openness, rather than hatred and mistrust." She would add that the peace needed was not simply the absence of war, but the absence of the causes of war.

Inspired by these two champions for peace, I know that each of us can be thermostats for peace, not thermometers that mirror the politicized ideas of what is "realistic," and which often tell us that violence and war is necessary.

Responding to the recent acts of violence in our community, I don't hear suggestions that such events are necessary, nor have I heard that label "unrealistic" given to the idea of working together toward a community where violence is not present.

Yet, we accept war as "necessary" and consider the promotion of peace (including the conditions that encourage peace) "unrealistic" as a primary means of securing our broader national community. A few of us actively promote this notion, and the rest of us accept it through our silence.

Which brings us to a good exit strategy for this piece. Find the strength that Kerwin and her classmates have found. Take a step toward actively becoming a peacemaker like the Peace Pilgrim. Cultivate within the peace that you wish to breathe into our community, our planet and our world.

This is the only remedy that will bring us from this discouraging moment of time where violence has increasingly taken us all hostage into a day when we -- individually and collectively -- know peace as the way of our world.

Anthony Fleg is a fourth-year medical student at UNC.