Abraham Lugo (Venezuela) is an LGBTQ+ immigrant and an advocate for peacebuilding, social justice and immigrant rights. He is an undergraduate student and the Student Body Vice President at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, United States. In his statement below, Mr. Lugo introduces a virtual campaign ¡°United After¡± that targets youth and shows how COVID-19 affects different communities and individuals.
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Hello everyone, my name is Abraham Lugo, I am an LGBTQ+ immigrant from Caracas, Venezuela, and a grassroots advocate for both social justice and peace building work.
In the wake of COVID-19, all of our lives on this earth?were uprooted into uncertainty, resulting in a vast showcasing of social, economic, and racial disparities across the world.
Although these disparities prevalently existed before the pandemic, COVID-19 gave a platform to the existing division between people everywhere, shedding light on a rhetoric that has historically divided people of all different backgrounds with new stories of hardships. This unfortunate truth of COVID-19 comes with one silver lining: an opportunity. This is where I came in.
The consistent battle throughout this pandemic has been to ¡°get back to normal¡±, trying, in a variety of different ways, to return to how life was before. But this platform of our divisions brought by COVID-19 is our opportunity not to get back to?how things were?before, but to adapt into a new era of compassion, unlearning, and rebuilding.
At the start of the pandemic, I was able to create a peace-building campaign called ¡°United After¡±, that acted to shed light on the different experiences the pandemic has given different communities, highlighting these racial disparities and the unfortunate circumstances of discrimination?that arose?from COVID-19. This was in hopes to amplify the voices of all different circumstances we, as people in a pool of diverse circumstances, experienced. However, the main goal of this campaign was in utilizing these different experiences to spread a message that allows all people to realize that, although many things were considered the ¡°normal¡± before the pandemic, many of that normal was?at the direct consequence of hatred, discrimination, and exploitation of personal privileges. We must now bask in a new age where we listen to one another,?celebrate each other's differences, and recognize that coming out of the pandemic, we cannot go back to how things were before.
Now, as Vice President of my university at the heart of?the Las Vegas community, I hope to finish this message by creating a wide scale, community-based memorial of where we stand today, still in the midst of this pandemic, that promotes this message of peace and collaboration moving forward.
Now I speak here before all of you in hopes that you will spread my message as far as it can reach, so that whatever land you may hear this from, you know that to become better, we must never revert to how things were before this pandemic, but instead, to be, United After. Progress starts with us, so thank you, and good luck.
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Each year the International Day of Peace is observed around the world on 21 September. The UN General Assembly has declared this as a day devoted to strengthening the ideals of peace, through observing 24 hours of non-violence and ceasefire. This?Youth Action for Peace?series brings together voices of university students around the world?sharing the same mission: to celebrate peace by standing up against acts of hate online and offline, and by spreading compassion, kindness, and hope in the face of the pandemic, and as we recover.
