Chapter 1: The Greatest Day Ever
by  Melissa Taylor

       Hi. I’m Melissa Taylor, a fairly ordinary Junior High School student from a small town in New Jersey.   I’m just so excited to be here today.  This is DAY ONE --  the first day of a new year, and the first day of the rest of our lives. I know that there will be even better days in my future.   I hadn’t been sure before today -- September 11th has left its mark on everyone I know, even though I was a just a little kid when it happened and changed our world forever.  But now I’m thirteen, and the future’s open wide and full of hope. In all of history there hasn’t been a more important day than this.

       Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve had this dream.   In the dream I’m standing on top of a mountain, and everyone I love is all around me smiling.   Everyone I know is there, and we’re all holding candles and softly singing “Let there be peace on earth...” And the candles spread out across the mountain top, and down below into the valley, and out across the horizon.  Then I am sailing up above looking down, and I see that all around the world people have joined together.

       In a wonderful way, that amazing scene happened last night.  People celebrated together, and for the most part, there really was peace on this earth for one wonderful day -- One Day In Peace.  Truthfully, I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but I think that the world has changed somehow, and I know that it’ll be a better place for everyone, now that we’ve seen what we are capable of doing when we work together.

       Wow.  So, where should I begin to tell you how this all started?  Should I go back to the beginning of time, when the first human tried to make life better for someone else? There are so many stories out there that you’ve never heard.  Sure you ALWAYS hear all the bad things on the news, but you hardly ever hear about all of the millions of things --  little and big -- that ordinary people like you and me (whether we’re kids or adults) have been doing and ARE doing to try to make a better world in their own way.

       But those tales are for another story.  I’m supposed to focus on the events that brought this little group together and how we helped unite the world. I could go back to the time I was born to two idealistic ‘want-to-change-the- worlders’ and how my Mom ‘grew up’ and as a social worker found a way to practice what she believed in while keeping her feet on the ground, while my dad continued on with his head in the clouds, chasing one cause after the next.

     Or I could jump to that one special mission that captured his heart for years -- the One Day In Peace, January 1, 2000 campaign and the Peace Dudes traveling troupe he and Uncle Merle and Aunt Maya were part of.  And how Mom and me, as a baby, traveled with the Peace Dudes in their Magical Peace Bus across the country, spreading hope for humanity’s first day of peace, ever.  But of course January 1, 2000 came and went.  The world celebrated mostly in peace, and the Y2K doomsday scenarios fizzled out without a whimper, but when all was said and done, almost no one knew about One Day In Peace.

       Should I start with the online PeaceKids Network from all around the world that I’m part of, and the amazing things that we’ve inspired in our communities as we promote the message that ‘peace is more than the absence of war -- peace begins with each of us, in how we treat each other, and the planet we share....’  But that, too, is another story, although you’ll definitely hear more about the PeaceKids in this tale.

       I guess the point that brought us all together was a year ago today, across the Atlantic in England, on another New Year’s that came and went with just the usual amount of goodwill, adult hangovers, and uncertain new beginnings.

       It wasn’t just an ordinary day for Jessica Martin, however.  Now, no offense, but Jessica was ‘The Queen of Mean.’  Only in her early-twenties, as the Executive Vice President of Global Missiles Unlimited, she’d already stepped on more people in her race up the ladder than Alexander the Great had in trying to conquer the world.  She did whatever she had to, to make the President/CEO/ Chairman of the Board, her Uncle -- Sir Reginald Martin III -- happy.  And, thanks to her ruthlessness, Global Missiles was the twelfth largest trans-national corporation in the world.  But I should let Jessica, I mean Jesse, tell that chapter of our story.  Take it away, Jesse.

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DAY ONE
A Novel about humanity's first day of peace
Robert Alan
The People For Peace Project
paperback, $7.95

UTOPIAN DREAMER