September 22, 2025
This email series highlights voices of peace from around the world, to help you find yours.
This month’s Voice of Peace is Louis L. Reed. He serves as the national senior advisor for Common Ground USA, which oversees all of Search’s US-based peacebuilding.
I was thirteen when my sister’s boyfriend shot her in the face during an argument. A year later, I was fourteen when a bullet tore through my own chest on a street corner. Two different moments, two different reasons, but the same truth: violence doesn’t care why.
Violence doesn’t care if you are a teenager, a partner, or a public figure. It doesn’t care about your politics, your paycheck, or your platform.
Violence doesn’t listen.
Violence doesn’t reason.
Violence only robs.
So when I heard Charlie Kirk was shot, I didn’t first think about who he was or what he believed. The truth is, I disagreed with him a lot. Profoundly. Our visions for America couldn’t have been more different.
But just a couple of months ago, I sat and shared conversations with him at his annual summit. Not because we saw eye-to-eye, but because we didn’t. We stood across from one another and argued our cases. That’s democracy – not silence, not violence, but the courage to clash without destroying each other.
When the news broke, my mind didn’t go to our differences. It went to the scar across my chest. To my grandmother’s tearful prayers in the hospital. To families – his wife and children now among them – living with a heart-sized hole that will never close.
And it challenged me to see the bigger picture: what happened to me, my sister, and Charlie Kirk is part of the same issue. America has gotten addicted to shortcuts. We don’t want the slow grind of argument or the discomfort of disagreement. We want things clean and quick. Instead of listening, we shout. Instead of wrestling with ideas, we cancel. And when even that doesn’t work, we reach for the most final shortcut of all: violence.
Violence feels powerful in the moment, but leaves us miserable in its wake..
It doesn’t settle conflict; it freezes it in place.
It leaves grief where dialogue could have lived.
It leaves shadows where light should have led us.
That’s why we need a different way – one that doesn’t erase conflict, but refuses to let violence define it.
That’s why at Common Ground USA, we refuse to let violence set the terms of discourse. Conflict is inevitable. Violence is not. Conflict is natural, even healthy. But conflict doesn’t have to end in someone getting hurt.
Our work is about teaching another way. About how to stay in the room when it gets tense.
How to fight for what you believe without destroying the person on the other side.
How to see the human-being across from you, even if you believe they aren’t being human!
Because common ground isn’t a compromise. It isn’t giving up what you believe. It is rejecting the lie that, in order to move forward, we have to silence, shut down, or hurt those who see the world differently from our truth.
And we hold to this truth: change is possible. We’ve seen it happen, in rooms where enemies sat across from each other and walked out as neighbors.
That’s the hard habit we need to recover: staying, speaking, wrestling, and refusing to let violence have the last word.
I know what it’s like to nearly lose my life to violence. Charlie Kirk’s family knows what it’s like to lose someone completely. If we keep walking this road, more families will know that same pain.
America doesn’t need another funeral to remind us of what’s at stake. What we need is the courage to practice the harder habit. Not violence, but dialogue. Not shortcuts, but the long, difficult work of understanding.
They say sticks and stones may break bones… but it’s violence that breaks our future. Only words can build it back.
