A few days ago talking with a friend, he asked me what I want, meaning something that would somehow easy my life at least temporarily. My answer was, a day without bad news.

Please don’t misunderstand me, despite small ups and downs I’m not complaining and my observation was more about my work than anything else. Again, don’t misunderstand me, I love my job and I can never imagine me retiring. How can you retire from writing after all?

I write about politics, culture, environment, occasionally about sports in daily base. And I’m grateful that there are people who read what I write and others who ask me to write. But that also means that I spend some hours every day browsing the news to find things to write about since most of columns and blogs are about contemporary news.

And this is where the trouble starts. Last weekend having to write five articles for different media in preparation for the holyday’s break, I got a bit dispirit. There were so many things to write about I didn’t know which ones to choose and all of them bad.

I mean the only thing I saw it was war, hostilities, revenge, hate, murder, loath, greed. And I don’t just mean in politics, it was everywhere. From the politics pages to social, culture or sports pages. The corruption of human ethos triumphing. Forgive me for using the Greek rooted word “ethos” but I don’t think there is another word representing best: the spirit, character, atmosphere, climate, prevailing tendency, mood, feeling, temper, tenor, flavour, essence, quintessence, animating principle, dominating characteristic, motivating force, disposition, rationale, code, morality, moral code, attitudes, beliefs, principles, standards, ethics all together in five letters.

Motivated from my desperation I checked the articles and blogs I wrote till now for 2014 and the summed to 438. 40 of them, 10% more or less are about or with reference to Middle East, nearly all of them talking in different occasions and for different reasoning for the last chance for peace. But peace seem to never come despite all the last chances.

And I’m sure many of you thing “oh, not again!” every time I mention the magic number 30,000. Yes the 30,000 kids under 16 that die every single day somewhere in our developed or not developed civilized world because our civilization continues to neglect them.

I’m not a religious person, I’m an atheist. Still I’m not a mentally blind person. And if there is an ecumenical message in Christmas, that can cover even an atheist, is peace on earth. Let’s give peace a chance. Just like John Lennon said it. Let’s give peace a chance. This is all we can ask for.

This is something we don’t do. We talk about peace, we wish peace, we even organize international peace talks but we are not willing to give peace a chance. Even for an hour.

And however unbelievable it sounds that every day 30,000 children die somewhere in this world, the same unbelievable is the fact that this world has seen absolute peace even for an hour for centuries.

And for me a sign on how dispirit we all are for an hour in peace is the fact that a few years ago, an elected politician was awarded the Peace Nobel Prize with the hope that he might do something to bring this hour of peace. The hope that he might give peace a chance. That’s how dispirit we are.

So let Christmas inspire us to unite all our voices so we give peace a chance!

Thanos Kalamidas