Peace-Children are holding each other by their hands. They wear colorful clothes and have different skin colors. It is the well-known symbol of embracing the diversity of cultures. The emblem shows the globe in the middle and the chain of smiling kids twined around it. It is the perfect symbol for peace: No racism, no hate, no suffering. World peace is something grown-ups hardly think about, not as children do. When I asked my six year old host-boy what he wishes for Christmas, he answered me, he would like to get the new LEGO®STAR WARS®-Set and “peace in the world”. Things seem to be so easy through the eyes of a child. I remember that his wish was the same as mine when I was a kid. When I grew older I realized that peace in the whole world is a matter that never will happen. This world is too complex. There are over seven billion humans, but humanity is missing. There are war, destruction, hate, anger, suffering as well as greed in the news, day after day. We talk about peace while we don’t understand the value of it. What is even the meaning of the word “peace”?
Humans call themselves intelligent and adaptable. If a person has to adapt to a new society he tries to work as a gear in the clockwork. Usually one is looking for a spot, where he can be himself; without getting mobbed or worse. In those places we don’t dream about our goals, beliefs and emotions- we talk about them, we live them. This sounds like the pursuit of happiness, but happiness and peace don’t have the same definition. Are love and peace the same? No, while love is an emotion that we are aware of in our life, peace is more of a subconscious state. My host-boy said the word “peace” is “kind of confusing” and he said “no war is also peace”. However when we are not in a war with our enemies, do we love them? The answer is “No”. We do tolerate them and probably we even respect their professional skills, that doesn’t mean that we like their behavior or points of view. Does peace need to be the embracing of differences? Yes it actually is. The United Nations is a subject of international law. It’s their job to better the intercultural bindings as well as trying to help peace. Ambassadors of all 193 countries meet to talk about strategies to solve the problems in this world. World politics are actually a matter as complex as “peace” itself. Politics creates rules for societies to better their living or make the coexistence of many people possible. Without politics there would be anarchy- no system at all. How should the globalized world, a country or even a city work, when there are no rules for chemical weapons, no regulations for currency and no human rights? That are the most unalienable rights which contain the Right to Live, Freedom from Torture, Freedom of Consciousness, Thought and Religions as same as Freedom of Speech. One has to say that those moral values are for sure part of the understanding of peace. If there is a place in this world with the absence of one of these values, the country is definitely not a vacation target. I don’t believe that we are aware of the paradise we are living in. I just stopped a second writing this text and the hectic routine and went to the neighborhood. I just realized that I don’t have to fear life for being white, Christian and a profound thinker. The moment of awareness made me danced. I will go to visit the Grand Canyon, a miracle of nature, in my vacation to be awestruck. The moment when a man feels the awe gives him the feeling of being insignificant on the whole. The knowledge of being irrelevant in the infinity gives him the deep feeling of relaxation and peace. There are no boundaries, because life is too short to feel burned out. . But is that all, what peace is? The feeling is that nothing that dims our mood is important enough to destroy our life as a whole. The joy of being alive swings in that moment, too. I actually don’t think that humans realize in their daily life the peace they have because it is not in their nature to celebrate the standard, but fear the change. The word fight comes always as antagonist of peace. It could be verbal or physical violence. On the one hand a fight could have soldiers, guns and arty, on the other hand it could be a fight with the boss, the family or the partner that vandalizes our peaceful daily routine. Those are the tiny things that should not let us feel desolate for too long. We should solve those arguments and should never go to bed angrily. Peace is about harmony, but not necessarily carefreeness. If we don’t solve issues they will become insurmountable. Ethical values get destroyed threw egoism, double standard and stress. We try to live with kindness and morality but we forget ourselves too often. I love philosophy and I think science-fiction has a very philosophic aspect. The genre loves to play with the “greatness” of humanity. A recurrent scene is about human trying to explain aliens that humans have evolved from a struggling hateful, devastating and greedy society to a gracious federation. What humans can’t accept is that they are double standard. Humanity means kindness AND greed. Wherever you look in history there seems to be a war or suffering of the many for the well-being of the few. I have to recommend Battlestar Galactica to every single person, because it is all about being human or not and heroes choosing the wrong path and antiprotagonists following the utilitarism: “The needs of the many overweight the needs of the few”. I just have to quote Sharon Agathon, a self-aware artificial intelligence, an antihero. Her words are from a conversation with the leader of the last living humans: “You gave a speech […] you said that humanity was a flawed creation, and that people still kill one another for petty jealousy and greed. You said that humanity never asked why it deserved to survive. [PAUSE] Maybe you don’t.” It seems to be realistic, because the characters are double faced /struggling, as every single human is. We can’t deny that there is something completely wrong with our species when you watch the refugee-numbers. After the UN formed in 1945 we thought our world would make process in making peace. The state we are in shows the opposite: There have never ever been as many refugees as nowadays! Why is that the case? There are wars in in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and more countries. Those countries are places where we don’t want to be, because it’s active life-threatening. The western countries love to live their pompous lives while it ignores the suffering poor ones. Moreover they outsource all the companies to increase the price umbrella. The reason for that they don’t have to pay a big wage in a country with no rights for the workers. It is all about greed and the never ending dissatisfaction of the few. The United Nations calculated the number of refugees worldwide in 2014 to almost 60 billion refugees! Why do families leave all their belongings behind to travel hundreds and hundreds of miles into an unknown future? When there is no safe place left people risk everything to survive. How can we sleep while people are suffering all around the globe? We decide to ignore those problems. How should we be able to continue our daily life, thinking about the cruelty in this world all day? It is indeed a defensive mechanism to be able to keep on living. We don’t care about the violent conflicts as long as we don’t have to struggle with the symptoms. Europe sees itself currently confronted with hundred-thousands of refugees from Syria. How can people call themselves adaptable while they struggle to accept the stranger from the Middle East in their home village? They say now- 4 years after the beginning of the war in Syria- that they have to change the situation in the distant country actively. I want to cry when I think about the state of war the world is in while you and I are having an argument about the movie we should watch in the cinema. In Elysium you can learn a lot about the situation with Europe and Syria. It is a fable, which shows us what could happen. There are all the people working on the Earth, while there is a space station called Elysium in orbit, symbol for Europe. The people in Elysium are incredible wealthy while the people on Earth often don’t know how they are going to survive the next day. Of course the inhabitants of Elysium don’t care about the fate of the inhabitants on Earth. They only care about the peace in their paradise. Everybody who tries to make his way to Elysium gets killed. There is no way to enter that station. The only reason for this situation is a powerful wealthy person in the orbit who is afraid to lose her children’s living standards and future. In the end the protagonist from Earth is able to enter the station and eliminate her. The poor people don’t have to hunger anymore, who thinks about the destiny of the rich people then?
Talking about the orbit and the planet brings us to another thing where we are definitely not in peace with: Earth. Everybody wants to have everything at the same time. We are exploiting Earth to get all the raw materials while we are littering the sea, the soil and the air. We act as if we could go on like that forever. That is not the truth. We don’t live in peace with our home planet. Earth is from a value for us, we can’t imagine, so we should try to coexist. Back in the past, the Native American did a great example for that. We forget, that we can’t survive without the planet. The funny part is that this blue planet will be here while we’ll be long gone. The question is if there will be any biological diversity left after our action… Will there be anything left from humanity? What happens when there will be another intelligent species one day? Will they also destroy different races, and in the end themselves just as we do? Would that also count as a result of their intelligence?
In the end I can say that we have to get aware of our actions or we will condemn failing in finding world peace. We have to take into account that we can’t build up an emotional relationship with over 7 000 000 000 people as a defensive mechanism. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to secure our very own survival. As a result we go on, living our lives and pretending everything is fine in this world. Actually we have to coexist, with our neighbor and strangers as well as our planet. We can speak up and spread peaceful messages of tolerance. We should not forget that living in peace means to tolerate first (i.e. giving) and then being tolerated (i.e. getting). Acceptance would be the next level of coexisting. Speaking of peaceful coexistence: It’s fascinating that every single astronaut says the same about the first time he saw Earth from the orbit: It was stunning- absolutely overwhelming. There are no borders visible from space. We are the inhabitants of Earth- we are one. We do look peaceful from up there. We live on that blue dot in the infinity. I think people look not down to Earth but up into the sky, because we try to catch the stars, since we are aware that human nature is wholly inconsistent.
However what can we enjoy for now? Humbleness teaches us to find the small treasure, which is actually the biggest one we can wish for. We can cuddle our sweethearts and feeling the luck of being alive and well together. We can speak up to be kind and live our words. We can dance in the rain and celebrate sunny days, but we should never stop showing courage.