Give Peace A Chance
Sunday
While using a handshake as an everyday greeting may go back several centuries to the Quakers, evidence of the practice to seal an alliance dates back nearly three millennia to a sculpture of Assyrian and Babylonian kings. Homer mentions handshakes in both “The Illiad” and “The Odyssey” to indicate trust and pledges, and illustrations of shaking hands also appear on artifacts from ancient Rome.
Monday
“Hippie” derives from the word “hip,” which likely first indicated something current and fashionable during the 1930s and 40s jive music scene. “Hip” was later applied the the Beat poets and thinkers, and soon after “hippie” was used frequently by San Fransisco journalists to describe members of the city’s 1960s counterculture before the word was adopted broadly.
Tuesday
The term “bury the hatchet” has a very literal origin. In this Iroquois ritual, warring tribesmen would meet and mark the end of hostilities by ceremonially burying a hatchet or other battle weapon in the ground. Non-Iroquois tribes later practiced this ceremony as well.
Wednesday
A ploughshare is part of a harvesting plow, and the word often appears in reference to the scriptural passage that the nations “…shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” from the books of Isaiah and Micah. This inspiration to turn weapons into peaceful tools gave the name to the bronze statute at the United Nations garden entitled “Let Us Beat Swords Into Plowshares” as well as similarly-named peace-promoting movements and foundations.
Thursday
The dove as a symbol of peace has long roots in many cultures. It includes the symbolism of love and renewal of life in ancient Greece, the end of war (when the dove carried a sword) in ancient Japan and later on Japanese stamps commemorating peace, and for divine forgiveness in Christian cultures, since a dove returned to Noah carrying an olive branch in the flood story. Doves were released as a symbol of peace starting in the 1920 Olympics’ opening ceremony and for many years thereafter. Pablo Picasso’s dove in his lithograph “La Colombe” also helped make the bird a standard peace symbol when the World Peace Congress chose it as their emblem in 1949.
Friday
Olive branches surround the world on the United Nations flag, are held in one eagle talon to represent peace on the US $1 bill, and are described in the saying “to extend an olive branch” as an offering of peace or truce. In one Greek myth, the goddess Athena planted an olive tree at Attica to promote peace and prosperity, and other well-meaning goddesses were often pictured with olive branches, including Pax, the peace goddess herself. Those defeated in a war held one to plead for peace, akin to a modern white flag. There is symbolism from the biblical flood, and the much later use of the image by proponents of a peaceful American independence from Great Britain. The tree’s own biology may play a role too, since olive trees grow too slowly to be cultivated during wartime, only peaceful times.
Saturday
The familiar circular peace symbol, made famous during the 1960s, was actually designed specifically to promote British nuclear disarmament. Artist and engineer Gerald Holtom designed the symbol for use in a 1958 march outside the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in London, and the symbol combines the flag semaphore signals for the letters “N” and “D” for “nuclear disarmament.”