Edinburgh Peace and Justice Resource Centre

This article was originally posted to the old P & J website by Idoia Garcia

The human brain is a mystery. Scientists say that we only use 20% of our total faculty, which means that many things are still to be discovered. We can remember our first day of school, when we broke a leg at 5, but sometimes wehave trouble trying to remember what
we had for dinner last night. Why do we remember some things more easily than others? Is it maybe that we don't want to remember? We cannot answer these questions yet one thing is certain: we can't let ourselves forget.

Wars are the most cruel acts human beings have invented. Thousands of battles have been fought and innocent people have died. We can't let ourselves forget. They had names, dreams and hopes. They had expectations for a long and happy life. But we keep forgetting
them. We forget who they were, where they lived and what they did. We even have to build monuments to be able to recall that a war took place, and that men and women died. A long wall in Washington DC makes us remember each and everyone of the American soldiers that died in Vietnam, but who makes us remember each and every Vietnamese?. We can't let ourselves forget. We have forgotten how many
people died in Kosovo, how many were killed in Angola and how many died for the divided Korea. This probably is because unconsciously we forget the bad and ugly events of our lives. This is understandable. However we have to be persistent and not forget and learn from our mistakes to not let it happen again. We all know wars do not result in anything good, so why do we keep fighting? Wars have only left us poverty, sadness and desperation. But we can make them stop here and now, with the desire for a better world. Because as John Lennon said: "Imagine there is nothing to kill and die for... Imagine all the people living life in peace... and the world will be as one".