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Nicholas Kristof & Maro Chermayeff Kick Off Peace Week 2015 with Lecture

Though they can be hard to find in a world beset by poverty, violence and everyday hardship, there are solutions, and art can make them visible. Those were the core messages Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof and filmmaker Maro Chermayeff delivered in a Peace Week lecture in the Meetinghouse on February 9.
Though they can be hard to find in a world beset by poverty, violence and everyday hardship, there are solutions, and art can make them visible. Those were the core messages Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof and filmmaker Maro Chermayeff delivered in a lecture in the Meetinghouse on February 9 to launch Peace Week 2015 at Friends Seminary.
 
“When things just seem hopeless or daunting, where you don’t chart ways, even if they’re small ways, then people tend to do nothing. Their heart is open and they want to do something but they don’t know what to do. But what we do is try to help people chart a course,” said Chermayeff.
 
Kristof and Chermayeff’s lecture coincided with the release of the third part of their new documentary film, A Path Appears, on PBS, and they screened segments of it during their talk. From early childhood education in West Virginia, to sex trafficking in Boston, to education and social services in a slum outside of Nairobi, Kenya, the film follows Kristof and Chermayeff and a host of celebrities like Jennifer Garner and Mia Farrow as they zig-zag across America and the world to take a hard look at endemic and entrenched issues and the hardworking people trying to solve them.
 
Humans are hard-wired to feel empathy for other people, but tend to only feel it for people right in front of them, Kristof explained during the lecture. For everyone else, they spin a narrative that helps them to avoid feeling too bad about not engaging. He wanted his work to help bridge that divide, which he called the empathy gap. Additionally, after a career spent exposing social ills as a reporter and columnist for the New York Times, Kristof got tired of focusing on the problems without ever showing readers the solutions.  
 
“By shining a light on some of these real kids, we can chip away at some of these protected narratives and bring some real folks into the living rooms in front of us, and also push back at the idea that there’s nothing to be done, and show that actually there are solutions that can make a difference,” he said.
 
His message seemed tailor made for the theme of this year’s Peace Week, “Power and Persuasion: Art as Social Commentary,” and students like senior Julie Rosenbaum came away from the talk energized by the focus not just on important issues, but on the steps people are taking to make a difference. “The film is more than just learning about the issues, it actually tries to help solve the problems,” said Rosenbaum.
 
“A Path Appears” gets its title from a quote by Chinese essayist Lu Xun, “Hope is like a path in the countryside. Originally, there is nothing – but as people walk this way again and again, a path appears.” The message reinforces the idea that hope and solutions are contagious and that the work for spreading them falls to everyone.
 
That idea is at the heart of the work and teachings of Friends Seminary, and students took note.
 
“It’s great to come and see people say here’s a solution. It fits with what we do at Friends, the whole idea of bringing about the world that ought to be. It’s not just understanding or knowing the problems but also doing the work to fix them,” said senior Sam Zieve-Cohen.
 
 
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Friends Seminary — the oldest continuously operated, coeducational school in NYC — serves college-bound day students in Kindergarten-Grade 12.