Peace One Day
Posted on | October 18, 2010 | 1 Comment
September 21st Each Year More Photos
Why Should We Celebrate It?
The reason why people fight wars it very complicated. One could go on about it for pages, could write whole volumes. One could explain its historical causes, psycho-social causes, economic causes, moral justifications. On the other hand the reason why people fight wars is very simple. It’s because people think it’s all right to do so. Retaliation that would never be accepted between individuals is somehow thought appropriate for nations. So if we’re ever going to have peace on earth, we need some simple, straightforward thinking. We need simply to notice that wars never do any longterm good and that it’s time to try another way.
Learn more at: Peace One Day
Fortunately, a straightforward thinker came along a decade ago. Jeremy Gilley, a young freelance cinematographer, was making a film about peace, when he realized that, in all human history, there had not been one single day when people somewhere had not been killing each other. Why? Why was there never even one war-free day? Maybe, he reasoned, the place to start was with one day of peace. If people got used to just one day a year, perhaps then they could handle two. And so on, until one day, there would simply be peace.
Jeremy’s simple idea caught the imaginations of the great and the good. The Dalai Lama supported his campaign and the Secretary General of the United Nations. Angelina Jolie and Jude Law gave their famous faces to publicize it. Finally, in 2001 the United Nations declared September 21st each year as its Peace One Day. Perhaps never was a day of peace needed more than after September 9/11 rather than the war on terror which was declared in its aftermath.
It had taken a long time for the idea to catch on because people –even the media – are apt to think peace is boring: that it’s just the quiet bit after the shooting and bombing stop. Peace is much more than that, as the Peace One Day campaign has shown. On Peace Day, 2007, tenth anniversary of the launch of Jeremy’s campaign, a daylong ceasefire was declared in Afghanistan, allowing the vaccination of children against polio in otherwise inaccessible regions of that war-torn country. That same day, sixty tons of food were dropped to famine areas of the Sudan, and mosquito nets distributed to sixty thousand people in the Congo. Here in Britain, six thousand filled the Albert Hall to celebrate Peace One Day’s birthday and hear Annie Lennox sing “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This”, for so they are.
The campaign continues with work like this throughout the year and with a special focus on September 21st. Here in Norwich, we’ve been marking Peace One Day since 2006: sometimes with children and balloons, sometimes in more reflective ways. Again this year 2010, a lunchtime vigil took place at the Forum between 1 and 1.30pm on Tuesday, September 21st. Norwich Interfaith Link is the sponsor.Please join us to make your heartfelt wish that the world may be at peace one day.
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August 23rd, 2011 @ 4:21 pm
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