Fashion or Peace- Is media doing its best?
(Original)

Chi Ninh Ngoc Lan
(Age 18, Vietnam <Living in Canada>)
New Westminster Secondary, British Colombia

1990.

People stopped wearing jean tights when they called it outdated and started to follow the trend of flares.

2006.

When Lindsay Lohan is caught on LA streets shopping in her tights, a teen magazine puts a caption "Lindsay and her tights are cuter than ever" and almost unconsciously, the old fashion of the nineties is revived to be the latest trend. The question is how many young girls have actually seen celebrities wandering on the streets dressing the style they are following? Perhaps it is not Lohan's fault that your wardrobe feels obsolete so fast. The blame is rather to be placed on those fashion magazines and TV shows like E-talk.

Media. What they show and what they say to the public can be regarded as a psychological strategy which insinuates certain perceptions to the public, including fashion trends to promote products. As the public are inundated with tights or slimness, they assume it as a social trend and thus start to adopt the idea, convincing themselves that it would serve to realize their hope of being socially accepted. Certainly fashion and peace are by no means interrelated, yet media is the invisible connector.

The idea of promoting peace can be approached the same way as creating fashion trends. To fabricate "the fashion of peace", images of peace as well as of war should be "bombarded" to the public as much as, if not more than, Hollywood stories. Today's media seems to focus more on superficial issues. Flickering through a newspaper and hardly would you miss an advertisement of a weight loss product. It is therefore understandable how the public seem to concern about losing weight and pay almost no attention to building peace on their own earth. Were dead bodies, burned villages, live battles with tanks and guns, death toll statistics to be shown as often and as much to the public as how Paris Hilton is doing in jail, more concern would be raised on building a peaceful world, and thus more initiatives would be made. In some cases, hyperbole is perhaps effective in calling for public attention to world peace.

Ninety-eight years ago when War World 1 was haunting every child's dream in Europe, most of the heartbreaking stories of flesh and blood spread by mouth of witnesses or victims. Fifty years later, the world saw a Vietnam being mass-bombed on TV or daily newspapers. Twenty-first century, information is more accessible than ever thanks to the advance of communication and media technology; yet there is still such a thing as the Iraq War to watch. Is the advance of technology doing its best role in bringing people with different religions and different desires together in harmony? The question remains unanswered, for the solution is to be held by the media itself.

Wars start from selfishness and avarice, both of which naturally adhere to human beings. Nature is not something to be eliminated completely. Yet as people have learned to compromise with nature by dykes or hydroelectricity plants, peace can also be created. A challenge that needs global attempts and contribution to solve, peace needs media to bring the world together because people need a trend to follow.