[/media-credit] Protestors of violence gathered to march for their beliefs in Bangor’s West Market Square, Sept. 19, 2015.
By Chloe Dyer
Downtown Bangor’s West Market Square was adorned with banners, enthusiastic marchers holding signs and speakers atop a stage overlooking a crowd, Saturday, Sept. 19.
Their reason for being there? To end violence.
The End Violence Together march sought to work toward ending violence on multiple issues, ranging from poverty, war and the environment. This is the second annual march, which began last year.
The idea for the march came from Mary Ellen Quinn, a longtime advocate of peace and nonviolence awareness, and member of Pax Christi Maine. Last year, she approached Izle Petersons, who has been the program coordinator of the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine for 21 years, and the planning took off from there.
“After years of organizing the HOPE festival, [the End Violence Together march] seemed like a natural thing for the Peace and Justice Center to do,” Quinn said.
Last year, the event drew about 200 people. The event coordinators worked harder to reach out through media this year, and hoped to reach more children and families, as well as young people in universities.
”It is the young people who inherit this world,” Petersons said.
This year’s event was larger than last year’s, featuring music, local speakers and children’s games and activities preceding the march.
“We really do want to reach out to the young adults at the university and elsewhere,” Quinn said.
Petersons emphasized that people often feel that they cannot do anything to help make the world a better place.
“You don’t have to do it all. We can see that our efforts are part of a larger movement,” she said.
“It really helps us to see that we are all working towards the same goal to create a culture of nonviolence and peace,” Quinn said.
Two groups from University of Maine were among the 40 co-sponsors for this year’s event — the Student Women’s Association and the Maine Peace Action Committee (MPAC). This is the second year that MPAC students have come from university to participate in the march.
Hilary Warner-Evans, a fourth-year anthropology student at UMaine, has been involved with MPAC since her sophomore year, and is the treasurer of the group. She participated in the march last year and attended again this year.
“Last year it had kind of a hopeful feeling to it. I guess you can see all these people coming together to support a common cause even though they all have separate interests within that cause,” Warner-Evans said.
Dan Shorette, also a fourth-year anthropology student, is interim president of MPAC. Both he and Warner-Evans went to the People’s Climate March in New York City last fall, with buses full of students who went down from UMaine. Shorette has been involved with MPAC since his freshman year at the university.
“It is a huge community event. We have all these different groups to focus on one big goal,” Shorette said.
Over the course of each academic year, MPAC puts on several events throughout campus, depending on what their focus is at the time. Every year they are involved with the HOPE Festival, and also hold a film series each spring.
MPAC also has tables in the Memorial Union to hand out pamphlets and engage students who are interested in peace and activism. A few years ago, they put on a one-act play about the cost of college and student debt.
Douglas Allen has been a professor of philosophy at UMaine for 42 years, and has been an advisor to MPAC since 1974, his first year teaching at the university.
“It shows that we are all interconnected and support each other,” Allen said. “[The march] provides a lot of positive energy and alternatives. Things don’t have to be this way. We can create relations that are much less violent.”
Cara Oleskysk, a nontraditional student studying sustainable agriculture at UMaine, has been active in several peace groups in the area. She is a member of Food AND Medicine, the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine and co-founder of the Bangor Racial and Economic Justice Coalition.
“The End Violence Together event is in celebration of nonviolence. We are doing a national week of social justice action,” Oleskysk, one of four speakers at the march, said.
Dan Fleming, of Brewer, Maine, attended the event Saturday because he works with the Shaw House in Bangor, which helps homeless and at-risk youth in the area. Fleming said that many of the youths were victims of lifelong violence and discrimination, and that the Shaw House supporting this event just made sense.
“This is an event that is near and dear to us. This is just something we come out and try to support,” Fleming said.
Warner-Evans and Shorette emphasized that MPAC was open to any students with a “progressive mind”, and that they were an open-minded group. For interested students, MPAC meets Wednesdays at 3 p.m. in The Maples.