For the past several weeks, I’ve been working on my speech for the Peacemaker Awards dinner next Saturday. The National Conflict Resolution Center has hosted this event for 38 years now, to recognize individuals and organizations working with passion and purpose toward a better future for all Americans.
Our theme this year is “Meeting the Moment.” It has me thinking about ways NCRC has responded when the status quo was no longer an option – nor was giving up. “Meeting the moment” is about showing curiosity and engaging when the stakes are highest, rather than retreating into the safety of an echo chamber.
One of the stories I’ll tell is about NCRC’s work in middle and high schools, where hate speech and bullying have practically become commonplace. Just recently, I heard about a group of high schoolers who taunted an African American student with a vulgar racial slur, just to see his reaction. The young man smiled because he didn’t know what else to do. Then he walked into an empty classroom, sat down, and started to cry.
NCRC is teaching youth to meet moments like these as upstanders – to do or say something, rather than joining in or giving tacit approval with their silence. It’s a courageous thing to do, but it’s never easy.
Perhaps my speech preparation has brought on a bout of “red car syndrome,” but it seems the news has been filled with powerful examples of people “meeting the moment.” (Red car syndrome occurs when your brain, newly exposed to a specific item — like a red car — subconsciously begins to look for it. You think red cars are everywhere, but really, your awareness has increased.)
Recently, the nation of Hungary – standing at a democratic crossroads – met the moment, with record numbers of citizens turning out to elect a new leader, Péter Magyar. If you watched the post-election celebrations, you couldn’t help but feel the joy as a massive, grassroots movement reclaimed the political narrative. Hungarians demonstrated that a moment of divisiveness can be converted into a moment of collective agency.
Several days after his defeat, five-term prime minister Viktor Orbán broke his silence. In a YouTube interview, Orbán took full responsibility for the loss. He said, “This is the end of an era. We must bear this defeat with dignity.” Orbán met the moment.
At Yale University, a committee of professors wanted to know why public trust in higher education had collapsed. It examined skyrocketing tuition costs, opaque admission practices, and uneven academic standards, among other factors. The panel’s report, which was commissioned last April, amounted to a “damning depiction of academia’s role in cultivating the political and cultural forces that are reshaping higher education’s place in American life,” said Alan Blinder in The New York Times.
Co-chair Beverly Gage said the report takes the “long view.” She acknowledged that distrust, which has built over time, will take time to reverse, “requiring not just changed communication but real, substantive action and self-critique.”
University leadership is “meeting the moment” in two ways: commissioning the report to begin with and embracing its recommendations. It requires a willingness to be vulnerable, but also to take responsibility.
Recently, New York Times reporters Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes broke a disturbing story: that Cesar Chavez, co-founder of the United Farm Workers and civil rights icon, had groomed and sexually abused girls who worked in the movement. The (now) women decided to go public more than 50 years after the abuse occurred. Among those who spoke up was Latina activist Delores Huerta, who the reporters said, “framed her silence at the time not as an absence of pain, but as a kind of strategic necessity, particularly as a woman fighting for respect in the male-dominated world of 1960s union organizing.”
Their actions show the importance of upstanding, even if it doesn’t happen in the moment.
On Saturday night, I will ask the Peacemaker audience: “How are you meeting the moment?” The throughline connecting the people of Hungary, the leaders at Yale, and the Chavez survivors is bravery. These were big, bold actions having uncertain outcomes.
But we can meet the moment in small, invisible ways, too: how we handle a disagreement with a colleague at work, how we support a friend amid a personal crisis, how we navigate a divisive election with loved ones. “Meeting the moment” is about individual actions taken not in isolation but in recognition of our shared humanity.
NCRC’s Peacemaker Awards dinner will be held on Saturday, May 2, 2026, at 5 p.m. For information, or to register, visit ncrconline.com/peacemaker.
Steven P. Dinkin is president of the National Conflict Resolution Center (NCRC), a San Diego-based organization that is working to create innovative solutions to challenging issues, including intolerance and incivility. To learn about NCRC’s programming, visit ncrconline.com.