My kids and I spent the first half of yesterday at the 29th annual Peace Festival, a riotous cacophony of “local groups and organizations active in social justice, human service, human rights, environmental sustainability and peace,” according the director of Oklahoma City’s Peace House. The local UU churches were there, the NAACP, the city Homeless Alliance, the Raindrop Turkish House, a local “womanist organization with a strong lesbian focus” known as Herland (presumably named after the utopian novel) along with any number of environmental activists and progressive lobbying groups. All of these groups are actively working to make the world a better place, some for the sake of their own constituents, others for the sake the general welfare.
The local atheists were on hand, as always:
Representing at #PeaceFestOKC pic.twitter.com/s75ti5UavI
— Oklahoma Atheists (@AtheistOK) November 8, 2014
And the local church-state separationists as well:
What I usually find most striking about the Peace Festival is the inclusivity of their approach. In previous years I’ve tabled with the Oklahoma Libertarian Party, advocating for freer minds and markets while seated right across from the representatives of the International Marxist Tendency. Every year, godless skeptics compete for headspace with The Urantia Book. People pushing for a more science-based approach to climate change are seated two tables down from the essential (snake) oils sales booth, where they have somehow combined alt-med quackery with multi-level marketing.
I have no love for Marxism nor Essential Oils, but I do think it is admirable how The Peace House manages to bring together such diverse set of people and ideas under one roof. This is surely in marked contrast to how social-justice activism generally plays out on the internet, where litmus tests and outgroup-shaming run rampant. Maybe it is the temperament of the people behind The Peace House which makes this sort of diversity possible face-to-face, or maybe there is something about the depersonalization or demographics of the internet that makes it so much worse.
Your thoughts?
