peace one day

This Sunday is International Day of Peace. A few weeks ago a young women from my youth group suggested that we should do something - so we have commandeered the Sunday afternoon church service for the sole purpose of promoting peace; personal, local and global peace.
As the UK (see below) ad campaign asks:

"What will you do to make peace?"

Check out these stats from New Internationalist:
In recorded history since 3600 BC, over 14,500 major wars have killed close to four billion people - two-thirds of the current world population.

• In armed conflicts since 1945, 90 per cent of casualties have been civilians compared to 50 per cent in the second World War and 10 per cent in the first.
• Around 85 countries have undergone some sort of disarmament since the end of the Cold War in 1989, but 69 nations have been increasing their stock of weapons - mostly low income countries buying from the richer ones.
• The United States is the world’s biggest arms exporter - supplying around 40 per cent of the developing world’s arms.
• The U.S military budget is as large as the next ten, top-spending, countries combined.
• Britain is the world’s second-largest arms exporter with a 25 per cent share of the legal global market.
• Between 1990 and 1994 Britain supplied 13 per cent of total arms exports to sub-Saharan Africa - while at war from 1987 to 1994, Angola received $7.3 billion worth of British arms.
• There are at least 250,000 child soldiers fighting in armed conflict.
• Most countries consider young soldiers ‘volunteers’. But often coercion is involved - in Uganda around 8,000 children have been abducted for use as soldiers or prostitutes.

Here is a video on the idea and origins of Peace One Day. I love it; it paints a picture of a man with a dream to change the world, obsessed by it, making it happen, growing the dream-almost-reality until it is big.. really big....