October 19, 2026
This month’s Voice of Peace is Chad Burgess, a medical malpractice and personal injury attorney in Tampa Bay, Florida. He’s also part of The Frontline, Search’s monthly donor community.
As an attorney whose entire career centers on conflict, I am fairly conflict-averse. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned the importance of taking time to slow down when I feel activated, to take a deep breath and help bring down the temperature—for me and for others. But there are still moments—like when I’m playing hockey, or when someone says something rude to one of my kids—where my fists clench, my jaw tightens, and everything in me prepares for a defense.
As a young boy, I saw things through an “eye for an eye” lens. If someone pushed me, I had to push them back. If they did something to me, I was doing the same in return. It was only as I got older that I started to realize: a cycle like that just goes on forever. Then I started to see that cycle everywhere, in wars and conflicts across the world. As a young teenager, I vividly remember one Sunday morning driving to church with my parents, and seeing the pastor of the church we’d previously attended standing outside, holding signs that called for peace and rejected violence. At the time I didn’t have a framework to understand that fully, but I recognized that he might be on to something. Now, I’m certain he was.
What’s interesting about conflict in my work is that it’s two-fold. There is the obvious conflict between the clients in a case, but there’s also the conflict between the lawyers who represent them. Egos often dictate so much here, as well as the lawyers’ driving need to win a case in order to be paid for their work. Emotions are high, tensions are palpable, and it’s easy to think that a favorable outcome for a client will resolve things. But the truth is, in my field, the primary resolution is a financial one. This can be important, but so often it’s ultimately unsatisfying for a wronged party or a wrongly accused party. The process seldom leads to a full engagement with or reflection on the conflict at hand, and never can fully address how people have been impacted by it.
I don’t want to devalue the legal system, but I do want to be part of helping people resolve conflicts in more comprehensive, constructive ways that actually address the conditions that gave rise to the conflict in the first place. This is what brought me to Search, and it’s why I became a monthly donor. Search’s work actually provides communities the means to engage one another and address shared challenges without resorting to violence. That’s the kind of world I want to live in, and the one I’m investing in with Search.
Posed with the two options of avoiding conflict or perpetuating it, I choose the third path. I want to prevent conflict, to deescalate it, and, when necessary, face it, learn from it, understand other people’s perspectives on it, and—together—work towards the things that make survival easier for everyone. If we want to disrupt the cycles of violence and destructive conflict we’re all caught up in, that’s our only option.
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