World Peace: Making it Personal
(Original)

Sharon Rogart
(Age 15, USA)
Langley High School, Virginia

I once sang a song in elementary school chorus: “We are the young, the children of the future, we hold tomorrow in our hands…” This repeated multiple times, just in case the message wasn’t clear enough. We are today’s youth and we must form our future. I believe that we should use technology to link together our youth all over the world to bring peace to a more personal level.

While it’s very nice to talk about peace on the global level, it is very difficult to focus on the global over the personal. It is true that peace in the world and the role of media are global issues faced every day, but aren’t we trying to address how the youth of today are supposed to contribute? My answer to this appears simple, but would actually involve much more “behind the scenes” effort than meets the eye. The best way to enhance world peace is to tie together today’s youth in a personal way. What better way is there to do this than the Internet? If children could have an international connection with other children starting from early childhood, they could develop compatible friendships. This would hopefully avoid stereotyping and help our youth learn to accept cultures different from their own. Friendship equals acceptance, and you can’t have peace if you don’t accept and understand the other group of individuals.

Here’s the problem. I can already hear my OWN parent’s protests to the idea of ‘online friends’. “The internet is dangerous,” parents around the world will say in different languages. “There are online predators, it’s not a safe place for young people like you. You can’t trust your ‘online friend’. It’s just not safe!” Ok Mom, Dad, Maman, Papa, parent or guardian…what if my proposal is sponsored by school and secure organizations like UNESCO and the GOI Peace Foundation? Yes, that’s right. What if at school, my teacher assigns me an ID and a password, and I am able to connect to an online forum of kids my age, and then make friends all over the world? How’s that? I think this is the best way to achieve understanding, hopefully, leading to world peace. Already in the US students do all their work on computers. Let’s use technology and grand organizations to better future relations between countries. The governments of various countries involved in the program could endorse it and help to make sure that kids and only kids are involved. Since the plan endorses the mission plan of UNESCO and GOI Peace Foundation, the forum could be based on one of their websites. It’s much less expensive than a student exchange program, but would still join together young people from different places. Security might be a challenge, but with the many organizations supporting the forum, this issue would be overcome.

I know that this program can work from my own experience. Around seventh grade, I stumbled into Fanforum, an online community where you can talk about various interests. I met many people from all over the world whom I befriended and chatted with daily. I had a whole new outlook on the world, and knew people from England to California to Croatia. However, school assignments became more demanding as I grew older, and I lost the time to ‘post’ every day. It also became less safe so my parents deterred me from posting as much anymore, but I still talk to these friends online every once in a while, and still consider them dear friends.

Language barrier? What is this language barrier you speak of? Oh…the fact that Johnny only speaks English, but Pauline only speaks French, but they desperately want to talk? This is not really a problem. We live in a technological age - there are online translators galore that would give children the opportunity to instantly translate what they are trying to say to and from different languages.  The United Nations and many other international organizations have defeated this problem as well. We can use those advances to help this program. Talking to people all over the world might encourage children to learn other languages at an early age.

Media and advanced technologies have made the world smaller. Two decades ago it was not possible to meet people who live all over the world and chat with them daily without going broke or either individual leaving the comforts of home. Certainly this has had a great cultural effect as more modern forms of technology have made travel, research, communication, and trade easier and less time-consuming. The next step to a better future is to use these advances to connect our youth together on a personal level in order to encourage world peace.