Bringing peace into 2025
Diana Oestreich has made a career out of making peace, so she brought some ideas for how everyone can make 2025 a more peaceful year.
She is a third-generation Army veteran who was deployed in the Iraq War. Her tour there flipped everything she believed about war on its head.
“When I was in the war for 397 days, I ended up – war convinced me that peace is strategic,” Oestreich said.
She says what it means to wage peace is to show up and disrupt the violence to get what we most want, which is freedom.
In polarized times, Oestreich said we should show up for what we most believe in.
“We don’t settle for denying the realities of how our systems are pretty dehumanizing. We actually show up with our full humanity, and we fight for each other,” she said. “So peace defends people instead of policies.”
Diana Oestreich has an upcoming talk at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 13, at the Mitchell Auditorium on the College of St. Scholastica campus. It is free to attend.