Miriam, 21 | New Jersey
I Thought There Could Be Peace
I went off to college believing.
Believing people could sit across from one another
and stay human, even when they disagreed.
I thought history was something I’d study,
not something that would walk beside me to class,
follow me from my classroom to the dining halls and suddenly
demand that we choose who was worthy of empathy.
I thought I could live there in peace.
I watched the world fracture.
I watched grief become a competition.
I watched people mourn some lives loudly
and treat others as footnotes or worse -
illegitimate.
I watched friends become silent,
and strangers become certain of everything.
I wished I could find some peace.
Yet I continued to walk to class, coffee in hand,
With voices rising around me.
Echoing off the buildings,
"From the river to the sea"
like something I was supposed to accept
or ignore,
or fear.
And how quickly an ordinary walk became something else.
I lost my sense of peace.
I saw posters ripped down.
I saw friends hide necklaces,
tuck stars beneath sweatshirts,
and calculate which classes were safe.
I heard words I thought we’d never hear again
spoken casually between lectures -
And in lectures.
The hatred felt older than all of us.
I wondered if there could again be peace.
What hurt most was not the shouting.
But how people stopped listening.
Stopped believing that pain can exist on more than one side.
As if compassion were a limited resource,as if understanding one story
required erasing another.
You see, listening is necessary for peace.
And yet, there was something else too.
Students who refused to disappear.
Professors who wore their stars,
letting them rest against sweatshirts and sweaters,
visible in classrooms, cafeterias, and crowded hallways.
Classmates who carried Israeli flags across campus,
not as a challenge, not as a threat,
but as a declaration that they belonged here too.
I watched people stand a little taller,
holding onto identity when it would have been easier to hide it.
I was afraid for them.
I was proud of them.
I wished I was one of them.
I saw what courage looks like in the absence of peace.
I long for what could have been.
A generation brave enough to hold complexity.
A generation willing to grieve every innocent life.
A generation that understood that fear,
left unattended,
becomes anger,
and anger,
left unattended,
becomes hatred.
I still hope there could be peace.
I do not know how to repair what has been broken.
I do not know how to make people see one another again.
But somewhere beneath the exhaustion,
beneath the disappointment,
beneath the noise,
a small part of me still whispers,
I thought there could be peace.
