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A Rwandan friend who was visiting Addis Abeba this week sat across from me and said, “When I read about Ethiopia today, I think of what happened to my country.”

Many people have made this comparison in the past two years. Life in Ethiopia has become unpredictable. While it may be easy to blame one or the other group, our own responsibilities for the stability of the country should not be overlooked as well.

Ethiopia is said to be among the most religious countries in the world. Beyond the statistics, at a very individual level, people tend to believe in a higher punishing and rewarding being. People believe in good and evil and that the afterlife will be determined by our time on this earth. With even all this, we are living at a time when too many people are casually talking about the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, fearing that devastation could take place once more. We hear and see the opposite of what is taught in religious institutions.

To live through a type of trauma like Rwandans have gone through cannot be the kind of future waiting for this country. We should all be outraged, yet the outrage is misplaced. My Rwandan friend tells me, “Do you know how devastating it is to have to rent parents for your wedding, because you no longer have any family left?”

Peace is individually attained. It is the individual act of peace that can keep our nation safe. While we may all adhere to various beliefs, they must not be rooted in the oppression of another. Physical territory cannot be what we fight over, while we do not have the authority of our own minds. We have let those with ulterior motives take over the common sense of many.

Someone is expecting to win from all of this, but what could winning look like for us?

When we stop making our own minds up and choose loyalty to people instead of ideology, we become the playground for those who have individualist interests instead of a national agenda.

Our individual peace will guarantee the same to our nation. To be asked to defend an identity we have not chosen at the expense of others is manipulation. It is being played like a krar, bending to the will of others. Things like ethnicity, gender and country of origin are not changed by request. But choosing to love instead of hate, kindness in place of hatred, level headedness in place of blind passion are positive traits we can decide to embody.