 Hi everyone, I'm author Rivera Sun, I'm a member of Code Pink, and I serve on the advisory board of World Beyond War. I was recently on a call with the local peace economy, working with their great workbook on how we can really rethink the war economy and find a radically different story and way of being together in the world, different from our current state, but not necessarily different from most of human history. One thing I learned from World Beyond War is that war is not as old as we think. We're often taught that humans are inherently violent, that war has always been around, but that's not true at all. Let's take a quick look at just how young war is, and what else we've been doing as humans. So if you had to take a guess about how old war is, what would you say? Wouldn't it first show up for humans? The answer is it's only 12,000 years old. The first evidence of organized violence between groups of people is only from 10,000 BC. Now that sounds like a long time, but when you think that humans have been around as homo sapiens for 300,000 years, and as other variations of our species for much, much longer, it's just a blip on the scale of human history. So let's look at what is actually older than war, because we're often think, oh that far back, that must have been like cavemen days and it was so miserable. No, actually weaving is about 10,000 years old at least. Pottery is older than war. Paintings and ceremony is older than war. String and all of the things that you can do with string is older than war. Dogs have been around for about 25,000 years, which is twice as long as we've been going to war. So just think about that. We've had our best friend around for twice as long as we've been doing this crazy thing called war. Goddesses have been around for quite a long time and the goddess statues. So all the rituals and stories that we might be telling about those, same things with figurines and gods and goddesses. We know that fish hooks came about about 40,000 years ago. We know that we had flutes in 40,000 BC. So music, jewelry has been around for about 100,000 years. Imagine that 90,000 years of jewelry and sharing and exchanging and bartering and gifting and whatever goes along with ornamentation before we came up with the idea that we should organize into groups and fight each other over things like that. I think when you start to look at things like the fact that we've had boats and water vessels since 130,000 BC, you start to notice that we as humans have had a rich and amazing culture for a really long time. And then we used to tell stories that are really different than the constant war narratives that we're told now. So story came first. Maybe it's as old as the use of fire and sitting around on the dark night entertaining one another. And for all this time, hundreds of thousands of years, we've been telling stories that are about overcoming challenges, working together to see things differently to help our communities long before we ever came up with the idea of war and that this would be an interesting story. So all the epics you've ever heard, all the Hollywood movies about action heroes and war and star wars, those are all just very recent inventions. And there is a wealth of story and narrative that comes before that. And if we abolish war and we make a world beyond war, and we build out our local peace economy, we may have an equally long future ahead of us in which we tell narratives of peace. So let's work together to do that. Check out the local peace economy work with Code Pink, and let's work together to have a better future than the past that we've inherited.