Leaders Bridge Pathways to Peace

Participants of Roanoke's Creative Communities Leadership Program together with various civic and interfaith members are hosting a BridgeWalk at 3 pm on Sunday, April 17th in efforts to promote 'tolerance, diversity, and understanding in our ever-evolving community'. This article offers a reflective overview and calls for a collective response in support of the occasion.

For whatever reasons, perhaps only

because Spring has initiated her graceful embrace, I find myself again pondering the meaning of cast shadows. Although a fourth year approaches since the Virginia Tech massacre too, a renewed sense of hope nevertheless rests perched in response to the lessons emanating from an extended string of heartbreaking catastrophe. As I blogged in "A Crisis in American Leadership" some nine months after the Tech incident, and for grounds I couldn't possibly fathom in their entirety at the time, its occurrence marks a significant crossroad in my life.

More recently though, and as Marilyn Hamilton at Integral City mused in her blog only days after the Tucson shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in January, such episodes appear to reflect "strong “weak signals” that may be indications of onset of the human hive’s CCD in America"(1). Likewise, and as a former public school instructor, my own perspective over the last decade and a half has been profoundly affected by a pervading sequence of similar tragedies originating with the Oklahoma City bombing but including also the Columbine High School massacre, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Northern Illinois University (NIU) killings perpetrated by Steven Kazmierczak (see also - "Revolution, Anarchy, or Madness?: A Crisis in American Leadership").

Please visit 'City of Peace' to read the entire article.

Tags: Amchi, BridgeWalk, Harrington, Roanoke, Steger, Tech, Tinsley, Vance, Virginia, leadership, More…massacre