International Day of Peace walk and chalk with Peace Action Geneseo

On Wednesday, Sept. 21 at 4 p.m. Peace Action Geneseo hosted a walk and chalk event on the corner of Main and Park St. to celebrate International Day of Peace. This holiday was established by the United Nations and is celebrated annually all over the world, including right here on Geneseo’s campus. This year, Peace Action’s event was attended by approximately 20 participants; the group was composed of both Geneseo students and members of peace organizations local to the town, Geneseo Valley Citizens for Peace (GVCP) and Veterans for Peace.

Senior sociology and sustainability double major Ruby Morris, the president of Peace Action Geneseo, organized and led the event with great success and cooperation from local organizations. Morris described Peace Action’s motivation for putting on this event as one focused on awareness and finding balance in the modern political sphere.

“Peace in general, but also the world climate and what’s happening in the world—injustices, but also positives and righting the wrongs—should be known,” Morris said. “I think our club does a good job at talking about things that need peace, but also things that are peaceful, so I feel like we get a well-rounded understanding of that [that] the rest of the Geneseo community might not. So, we wanted to use International Peace Day to spread the word that, ‘Hey! The UN made this day, and to some people it’s really important, and it could be really important to you, and you just don’t know about it.’”

The establishment of International Peace Day as an annual holiday encouraged the maintenance of peace as a value present in the public consciousness; however, Morris did not speak of peace as something to celebrate once a year, but rather as a daily practice. Reflecting on the value of peace as ritualistic, Morris explained, “Peace is a virtue that we all should appreciate every day.”

While Morris attributed much of the success of the event to her experiences with Peace Action and community within the e-board and club as a whole, she remarked that peace is a personal journey as well as an external, social, and political goal.

“Personally, throughout my day-to-day life, I feel like I practice a lot of mindfulness and peacefulness within the mind and body… [I wanted] to bring the inner peace that I’m able to feel to everyone else, to celebrate the day,” Morris said. “There are a lot of problems in the world, and I think that to help commit to solving them you have to find your peacefulness journey on your own.”

Geneseo’s recognition of this holiday, despite Geneseo’s somewhat remote location, reflects the impact that the establishment of this holiday has had to foster peaceful citizenship across the world; but Morris also acknowledged the drawbacks of Geneseo’s location and the manner in which it might shelter community members from global concerns and conversations.

“To find the inner peace and then to spread the inner peace outer, to the outer circle and the outer world, is really important,” Morris said. “Being in the middle of nowhere at this school, I think it’s really important to talk about things that seem really far away.”

Peace Action meets weekly on Tuesdays at 7 p.m. in Bailey 247. For more information on Peace Action Geneseo, check out the organization’s Instagram, @peaceactiongeneseo.