“There is no way to peace, peace is the way”Mahatma Gandhi

We are the new generation, we are the future. We are going to change society. The future is in our hands. The people of our days don’t have big objectives, they aren’t conformist but the society of our days is trying to make that , they don’t realise the enourmous work that they have in front of them. In the past, youths have fought for the society welfare, some of these times so extremely that they founded the hippy communities. Now, we are on the opositte side, without being so extreme. In fact, now we are so weak, we need to find a middle point.

How can we change the world ? How can we make it better?

To change the world we need to know what has happenned through history. We should define peace, because, what is peace? . Peace is not only the absence of war, peace is commonly understood as the absence of hostility, or the existence of healthy or newly healed interpersonal or international relationships, safety in matters of social or economic welfare, the acknowledgment of equality and fairness in political relationships.

Etymologically, the English word peace came from the Latin word pax and Greek eirene. Peace has been an important part for many such as Buddhists, who believe that peace can be reached once all suffering ends. To eliminate suffering and achieve this peace, they need to follow a set of teachings called the Four Noble Truths( the central pilar of his philosophy ). Jews and Christians believe that true peace comes from a personal relationship with God. Christians said "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you."

In fact, peace is so important that many awards have been created to recognise the effort of many courageous people who have fought ( using the word, never violence ) to make a world a little bit better each year such as the Nobel Peace Prize Winner that is the highest honour and that has been given since 1901 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, or the Gandhi Peace Prize, named after Mahatma Gandhi and awarded annually by the Government of India since 1995.

These awards have been given to the most important people in the history of peace like Martin Luther King, a prominent leader in the African American civil rights movement. He is also famous for his speech “ I Have A Dream”he received the nobel prize in 1964 and was killed in 1968 due to his ideas. The nobel prize has also been given to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi a political and spiritual leader of India during the Indian independence movement. He developed the Satyagraha a philosophy and practice of nonviolent resistance. Since this prize started, 97 people and 20 organisations have received this prize. Also many organisations have been created to protect peace. For example: UNESCO (that looks after peace, education , culture), the MPDL (movement for the peace), Rotary International... and many more. Even some schools of thought have been intimately joined to peace such as the pacifism, that is a movement that considers that violence, even in self-defence, is unjustifiable under any conditions and

that negotiation is preferable to war as a means of solving disputes. In the First World War pacifists became known as conscientious objectors.

But this is not enough for us.We want to define peace by another way, a way that joins everyone in the path of the peace. A peaceful person is the one who tries to be in harmony with himself and with the rest of the people. It is based on giving and receiving perfectly balanced to reach his phisical and psicological welfare. We do not need to be so materialistic because life is very short so, at least, lets live happily. But, we need lots of time because there is a long way until we reach peace. As Lyndon Baines Johnson said : Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time.

This is really hard because the society that we are living in doesn’t try to reach peace. The society in which we are living is more interested in politics or economic problems. It does not realise that if we have peace there will not be wars so all the world will live better. People, sometimes, are selfish, they only want their happiness and general welfare. They do not look after the rest of the people and this is the biggest problem of society.

As peace is based on the respect to the rest of the people and yourself we need to avoid issues so polemic as violence, racism, abortion. All the problems with this is that the freedom of a person ends when the other one’s freedom starts.

Maybe, we couldn’t embrace all the people but even if we only teach the ones who are near us we can start a chain reaction that could finally change the world. This is similar to the butterfly effect, that considers that the flapping of a butterfly in any place of the world could cause a hurricane in the opposite part of the planet. In this school of thought we have created a group on facebook called “peace book” it has grown in an average of 50 people each day with people of lots of different places ( such as Spain, Great Britain, Germany, Croatia, Belgium....).

To understand this, we need to go to the root of all these problems. We can’t try to change the people by violence, because violence only breeds violence, blood only gives blood. We need to do what Christ said : “give the other cheek”.

The root of peace is the education given to each person. The self-conscience is what tells what is right or wrong so we need to teach our conscience with the family that is the pillar of society. It is the first institution that gives education, that is the reason of its importance. Using this as a pillar we can continue in the social field. The behaviour of the people in the street is the best marker of the reality, because everyone knows what to do but it doesn’t mean that they are going to do it.

How can we reach this people?

We need to teach them that themselves are not the only answer, that they can care about the rest of the people also. That helping is not so hard . We want society to change. But first, we need to make people change. We want the people of our age to worry about other things, not just having fun on Saturday night. We want a near future with all the people teaching their kids the ethical values of the culture of peace. But it is much said than done.

So, we need to take concrete actions but, in this world, nothing is free. That is the reason for winning the prize. We want to do many things but, except the voluntary, everything we want to do need an amount of money that we don’t have. And, voluntary, going to school and studying needs an amount of time that makes hard to do both at the same time. We have many big plans we can make something on the school and something out, we can talk about this to our friends, we can make a web, we can make grow pace book, we can take conferences and much more. But, we need to start with ourselves and not with the rest of the people because that is the essence of everything and this includes the culture of peace: don’t criticize the people for not being peaceful if you are not peaceful

If we could do it, why don’t we do it?