President Obama’s Powerful Remarks on Baltimore

Friends,

President Obama made some powerful remarks today on the violence erupting in Baltimore, and what we need to do as a society to make fundamental changes to address these tragic and systemic challenges.

President Obama shared:

“If our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It’s just that it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant, and that we don’t just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, we don’t just pay attention when a young man gets shot, or as his spine snaps.  We’re paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids, and we think they are important and they shouldn’t be living in poverty and violence.

That’s how I feel.  I think there are a lot of good-meaning people around the country that feel that way, but, that kind of political mobilization I think we haven’t seen in quite some time.”

This last phrase is such a salient and important point — particularly as we launch our big new initiative today, “Be the Movement! Take a Step for Peace: In Your Life, In Our Communities, Among Nations.”  We deeply resonate with President Obama’s call to action and plan to work our hardest to help do our part for this important movement.

Please join us with Be the Movement! and help us be this change we so need right now.

The Five Peacebuilding Cornerstones that are the foundation of this movement are all critical components of this necessary shift in our culture. Particularly for Baltimore, the Empowering Community Peacebuilding and Humanizing Justice Systems cornerstones articulate some of the key areas that need to shift, and some of the solutions that are ready to be implemented. You can learn more about all the cornerstones here.

Please read excerpts from President Obama’s important message to the nation, below.

In solidarity,
Matthew Albracht,
Peace Alliance

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President Barack Obama
Remarks on the challenges in Baltimore
April 28th, 2015
Excerpt

“We as a country have to do some soul searching.  This is not new, it’s been going on for decades.  And without making any excuses for criminal activities in these communities, what we also know is that if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty — they’ve got parents often because of substance abuse problems or incarceration or lack of education themselves can’t do right by their kids. It’s more likely that they end up in jail or dead than that they go to college. In communities where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men, communities where there is no investment, and manufacturing has been stripped away, and drugs have flooded the community and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks, in those environments, if we think we’re just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without as a nation and a society saying, “what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity,” we’re not going to solve this problem.  We’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflict between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets, and everybody will feign concern until it goes away and then we go about our business as usual.

If we are serious about solving the problem, then we are going to not only have to help the police, we’re going to have to think about what can we do, the rest of us, to make sure that we are providing early education to these kids, to make sure that we are reforming our criminal justice system so it’s not just a pipeline from schools to prison, so that we’re not rendering men in these communities unemployable because of a felony record for a nonviolent drug offense, that we are making investments to make sure they are getting the training they need to find jobs. That’s hard, and it requires more than just the occasional news report or task force…

If our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It’s just that it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant, and that we don’t just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, we don’t just pay attention when a young man gets shot, or as his spine snaps.  We’re paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids, and we think they are important and they shouldn’t be living in poverty and violence.

That’s how I feel.  I think there are a lot of good-meaning people around the country that feel that way, but, that kind of political mobilization I think we haven’t seen in quite some time.”

 

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Five Cornerstones of Peacebuilding
The Peace Alliance specifically prioritizes the following areas:

	Empowering Community Peacebuilding: Supporting comprehensive activities and strategies in communities working to address such challenges as crime, violence, and gangs. Effective programs may include hands-on street outreach and intervention, mental health services, out-of-school programs, police/community relations, and arts-based practices. Learn more!
	Teaching Peace in Schools: Bringing into our schools conflict resolution curricula with tools such as social-emotional learning, communication techniques, restorative processes, mindfulness and other proven peacebuilding skills to increase graduation rates and transform violence, bullying, truancy, and other challenges facing youth. Learn more!
	Humanizing Justice Systems: Moving away from overly punitive policies, toward healing-oriented criminal and juvenile justice approaches. Restorative justice, diversion/alternative incarceration programs, and prisoner rehabilitation & re-entry programs are among the most promising solutions. Learn more! .
	Cultivating Personal Peace: Integrating peace in our own lives, with our children, in our relationships, in the workplace, and in our approach to activism, through such methods as compassionate communication, mindfulness, empathy, and stress reduction. Learn more! .
	Fostering International Peace: Championing peacebuilding approaches to international conflict and atrocity prevention in hotspots through mediation, diplomacy, and effective on-the-ground programs. Important components may involve development, post-conflict justice, humanitarian aid, mediation and support for frameworks necessary for democratic processes. Learn more!

Take a step for peace that will change our world.