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Griego: Peace will take work, kids

Published April 30, 2007 at midnight

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I went to Saturday's launch of the Summer of Peace campaign, the call to stop gang violence in the city, and was moved by the sight of more than 200 teenagers marching across Speer Boulevard to 11th Avenue and the corner where, on New Year's Day, Broncos player Darrent Williams was killed in a drive-by shooting.

The young marchers, participants in a PeaceJam Foundation conference, shouted and chanted so loud that if will alone could silence every gangster's gun, there would be no more need for the campaign to come, the yard signs, the parent educators, the mentors.

Stirring, too, was the exhortation of Terrance Roberts, a former gang member turned founder of The Prodigal Son Initiative to help youth. He took the bullhorn and roared: "Whose community is it?"

"Our community," the crowd shouted back.

"Whose community is it?" he demanded a second time.

"Our community!"

"Whose community is this?"

"Our community!"

"The Summer of Peace starts today," he shouted. "Today is the day."

Mayor John Hickenlooper spoke, too. He called the shooting of Williams "an act of insanity, of violence without reason, that none of us should ever accept or tolerate." And Nobel laureate Betty Williams, who together with Mairead Corrigan -Maguire, won the peace prize in 1976 for their work to end violence in Northern Ireland, gave a rousing, short speech reminding everyone that peace takes work - peace doesn't fall out of the sky, she told me later. Williams, who joins other Nobel laureates in working with PeaceJam youth, ended with a feisty reminder: "If someone says you can't do it, spit in their eye."

It was a powerful afternoon, but I was struck by something right off the bat. The Summer of Peace campaign was born out of the Chicano Caucus on Youth Violence held earlier this month. It was a response to a call from Cisco Gallardo, the director of the Gang Rescue and Support Project (GRASP), who told the group that most gang activity in the metro area involves Latinos and that it's time for the Latino community to take responsibility for its youth.

Where are the Latinos, I wondered. "Most of the students here are white," I told Gallardo as we trailed the march.

"I know," he said. "We have to take this to the streets, to the barrios. But, I take this as a blessing. We want to take all this momentum and build on it."

With the growing attention on the campaign, he said, the young men in his group have started telling him they don't think peace is going to happen. He said that he tells them it won't be easy because changing your life is never easy and that he showed them the anonymous comments readers made in response to my first column about the Summer of Peace.

"You did?" I said, surprised. The comments include: "Time to spike the pinto beans with sterilizing drugs to stop (them) from breeding." And "Just sick of 'Latinos.' All they are good for is ripping you off and dragging society into the toilet. Sorry to the 5 percent out there that is worth a damn."

"Yeah, I showed them," he said. "They need to know what's out there."

"What did they say?" I asked.

"They were angry," he said. "I told them they have to realize that these are people looking into our community from the outside and sometimes that's all they see, the negative. Changing that is as much our responsibility as it is the responsibility of people making those comments to knock it off."

It turned out one reason so few Latino students attended is because the march coincided with the La Raza Youth Leadership Conference and many attended that. Also, notice was short, said Rudy Balles, a former gang member who works with PeaceJam and directed GRASP before that. Idea, organization and execution happened within one week.

"We want the Chicano community to take responsibility," Balles said. "But, we are all suffering from violence. We have kids here from Columbine. We have kids here from Platte Canyon High School. This is just a first step."

Last Thursday, two days before the march, police and federal agents arrested 49 people suspected of involvement in violent criminal gangs in the metro area. They seized, among other things, three kilos of cocaine, 28 pounds of marijuana, 32 guns, including an assault rifle, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, three grenades.

One of the people named in the indictment was once a GRASP kid, Balles said. "He was a leader. We had great hope in him, but it's hard to turn around kids. We've had great losses and great successes, and it's in both that we move forward."

The students who rallied Saturday did not know about the Summer of Peace campaign until the morning of the march. Later, several would tell me that they loved the idea and that even if they had no connection to gangs, it did not matter because a lot of them knew something about being judged or dismissed - and that if, in the end, all they did was "spread a little kindness," it was better than doing nothing at all.

PeaceJam founder Ivan Suvanjieff likes to say that he often sees "the spark of God" in kids. I can see what he means. When the students marched out of the school and into the street Saturday afternoon, they were brighter than the sun itself.