Ribbons of Hope from New York City I offer deep appreciation to Tolegen Mukhamedzhanov for inviting me to this forum, to President Naserbayev for his profound investment in a peace-filled future, and to the people of Astana for their warm hospitality. Today, we hear many lofty principles, but only as these concepts of mutual respect and understanding are expressed in day-to-day community life, can we succeed in changing the world. Can we do this? In the words of my President Barack Obama, “yes, we can.” Indeed, we must. But how? There are 1,000 stories we could tell. I will share just one. A year ago, I addressed this forum out of a context in New York of hostility, acrimony and the threat of violence in the wake of an angry controversy over creating a Muslim Community Center in lower Manhattan near the site of the World Trade Center terrorist attack in 2001.
The debate was sparked by ongoing suspicion of Islam and the Muslim community on the part of some New Yorkers and then fueled by politicians and pundits who used fear-mongering and demonizing to promote an intolerant and hate-filled agenda that drove a wedge between communities and neighborhoods. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who also attended this forum last year, was the lightning rod for this effort. His beautiful concept of a Muslim Community Center that would serve all New Yorkers was vilified as some subversive mega-mosque that would destroy American values and enslave its people.
There was genuine fear that violence would erupt, especially as we approached the 9th anniversary of 9/11. While we managed to avoid such an incident last year, we saw the tenth anniversary as being an occasion that could rekindle the flames of bigotry and fear. And we noticed one other thing—that the voice of concerned religious leaders was largely absent from the public debate and that spiritual values were muted.
And so, more than a year ago, six multi-faith organizations from around the city began to meet to avoid such a possibility as the tenth anniversary of that tragedy approached. The name of our coalition: Prepare New York. Our purpose: to equip New Yorkers and others to engage across lines of faith, culture, neighborhood and political perspective in order to make what our US Constitution calls a “more perfect union.”
We recognized that there was still very real grief and loss within the city itself, that lingered even ten years later. My daughter, who lived ten blocks from the World Trade Center and watched horrified from the roof of her building as the towers fell reminded me that these senseless acts of terrorism altered the very landscape or her community as if a whole mountainside had been obliterated. So, how do we create an environment that honors that grief and loss and yet turns from a purely retrospective look at the past toward a future filled with healing and hope?
We developed a multi-pronged strategy—and it is this that I share with the forum today in the hope that other communities who have face trauma or who encounter division might learn from us and employ some of the techniques we used.
First, we were intentional about building a partnership that was as wide and diverse as possible. The six initial organizations grew to a network of more than 100 companies, congregations and organizations, ranging from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, with its 400 congregations and 2.6 million members to the Jain Association of North America.
Second, in recognizing that the mainstream media in the US was a principle agent in promoting the hate-filled rhetoric that surrounded the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, we created media resources to counter that narrative and a social networking strategy to spread the message of reconciliation and peace. Our web hub and facebook page had a combined 100,000 hits in September alone. The video we produced, We The People, has had more than 60,000 views on YouTube and shows the long history of religious tolerance AND intolerance in America. Such an historical context—which includes prejudice against Catholics and Quakers and Jews and Japanese, who have now become part of the mainstream—gives us hope that current intolerance towards Muslims may also pass, as we work towards that “More Perfect Union.”
Religious leaders also underwent media training so that we could be equipped to engage the media with confidence and articulate the principles of diversity and tolerance upon which our country was founded and to be able to do that in the seven second sound bites that fill our airwaves.
We produced an on-line curriculum on religious tolerance for use in classrooms, congregations, work places and private homes that offers conceptual reasons for intolerance and practical means of building bridges across religious lines.
Third, we have held more than 200 Coffee Hour Conversations across the city whereby individuals have an opportunity to approach one another, get to know each other’s story, learn about one another’s faith and culture and begin to build the personal relationships that are essential to community trust and harmony. Our hope is to hold an equal number of these dialogues between now and the end of December.
Finally, on the weekend of September 11, we held two events that offered an opportunity for people to participate in acts of healing. The first was a traditional Buddhist Lantern Ceremony in which thoughts or prayers in memory of those who are lost are collected and placed in paper lanterns that are then floated in the Hudson River in the shadow of where the twin towers once stood—creating a most moving visual image. Religious leaders from far beyond the Abrahamic traditions led prayers.
The second was our Ribbons of Hope event. In this project we found a simple—this is the key—activity that people could do to take part in an expression of healing. We invited people to write down on a ribbon their thought or prayer or hope for the healing of the world. We then asked people to bring their ribbons to lower Manhattan where they would attach them to 12 nine-foot tall panels that created tapestries of different colors and textures and shapes and sizes—symbolic of the rich diversity that is found in the human condition. Journeying down to lower Manhattan in an atmosphere of healing reversed the flight of fear and suspicion that so many New Yorkers took a decade earlier, replacing it with a path that looks forward and leads to peace.
We had an opportunity for people to contribute their thoughts on-line and then several of us transcribed those messages onto ribbons. All kinds of people participated—about 20,000 in all—9/11 survivors, children who were not yet born a decade ago, farmers from the Midwest and third graders from Budapest, Catholic priests and Buddhist monks, students from California and lawyers from midtown Manhattan.
And now, and throughout the coming year, the twelve panels are being displayed in different prominent places around the city of New York and we have begun exploring the possibility of, in 2012, bringing these panels to different international settings as a living witness to healing and hope. We continue to gather ribbons and the panels continue to become enriched with new thoughts, new messages, new symbols.
And so I offer this experience to you who have gathered here and ask you to explore ways that these ideas may be transferred to your own setting. The key principles: (1) grow your base and be intentional about diversity; (2) share authoritative knowledge to combat those who would offer simplistic and often inaccurate answers to current controversies; (3) engage the media—they are a powerful force—understand the pressures on them, but prepare well so that you can articulate your message of peace and reconciliation; (4) provide an easy, accessible way that large numbers of people can participate—including children and; (5) finally, develop an ongoing vehicle that keeps your message alive and vibrant so that you can continue to transform lives and communities.
Oh, and one final thing—in New York on the tenth anniversary of September 11, despite a “terrorist alert” that came from Washington, there was no violence. Those who tried to spew hate held some rallies, but almost no one attended and there was virtually no media coverage. And, in perhaps the most significant symbol of the success of that weekend, when the authorities searched the truck—which they did frequently—as we moved staging equipment for our weekend events into lower Manhattan, they went looking for bombs, but found only ribbons.