VATICAN TO JERUSALEM TO
MECCA FOR WORLD PEACE

To help focus attention on the need for world peace and religious tolerance, Paul Solon will race by bicycle from the Vatican in Italy to Jerusalem in Israel and then to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, 19 hours a day for approximately 14 days. A team of six in two support vans will accompany Paul.

The Race Course
The start will be at St. Peter's Square at Vatican City. There, the team will receive olive branches, symbols of peace, to be delivered in Jerusalem and Mecca. From the Rome start, Paul will race across Italy non-stop, passing through Florence and Verona. He then will cycle through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Albania, and Turkey, entering Istanbul. Next will come Syria and Lebanon and Israel. The cyclist will enter Jerusalem, and stop at both the Western Wall and Dome on the Rock, delivering olive branches of peace. Gaza will next be cycled through, followed by southern Jordan, and thence across Saudi Arabia where the team will make an appearance at the Islamic Solidarity Games, an annual sports competition in April. The finish is at the Ka'aba in Mecca, where again olive branches of peace will be delivered.
The Mission
The purpose of the race is to bring a heightened awareness about the need for peace and religious tolerance. As General Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "Every gun that is made, every rocket fired, every warship launched signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."
This event from Rome to Jerusalem to Mecca is not about politics but about the longing to move beyond them. Not politics but hope inspires this event. People around the world are hungry for hope. People around the world are sick of war.
People want peace now. We do not want, as Dr. Martin Luther King would say, peace fed to us in teaspoons over the course of the next centuries. We want peace now.

There Is Hope
The world keeps delivering bad news. We see catastrophe happening all the time, be it famine, Aids, or the wars which are now exported beyond the West. We see figures of 655,000 Iraqi civilian dead caused by the war there and over 400 billion USA dollars spent to prosecute the war. Even with progress, new problems come: polio is cured, but Aids arrives; airplanes make travel easy, but they can drop bombs, a wall is torn down in Berlin but new ones are built up in Israel and Texas. Could it even be that time is moving backwards and things in fact are getting worse? Is not the world showing more cruelty, more aggression, more brutality, more injustice then ever?
With all the bad news, it is tempting to throw up one's hands in despair and give up on beliefs of peace and progress--it even might make sense to do so. It would be more fun--pessemists are more engaging and entertaining, and pessemism more urbane and cultivated. It would be easier--learning how to cope as best we can with our ailments without getting hands dirty by struggling to fix them means less work. So why not just give up on the notion of living in a world of peace? Why not give up on the idea of actual progress? Are things really getting any better?

Realistically, it makes sense to believe that they are. Despite the constant warfare and the current threats of future wars around the globe, signs of the change toward peace and progress and justice exist:
-In 1800, seventy percent of the world's people were in servitude bondage. The petition from Scotland to the English parliament to outlaw slavery was 75 meters long. Today, 200 years later, to all of us, the thought that slavery is right or permissible is unthinkable.
-In 1900, no nation allowed women the right even so much as to vote. Today, by nearly all of us, a position to deny the vote to women is outlandish.
-Apartheid was not abolished in South Africa until 1993. Today, only fifteen years later, a belief that it should be reinstated has no chance of success.
-In Nigeria, a Christian minister and a Muslim cleric who had never spoken to one another, who confessed they had wanted to kill the other, are now meeting and are becoming friends.
-At the Vatican, the Pope has extended his hand to the Orthodox Church, to the Jewish religion, and to Islam.
-By people around the world, Mahatma Gandhi is held up for admiration over a victorious war general.
-More citizens of the United States are now against the war in Iraq than for it (51percent to 49 percent). The percentage will increase.

There are grounds to believe the world is not staying the same, prisoner to the same old miseries, nor falling backward and becoming worse. Even with wars, invasions, and genocide, overall change for the good does exist and is happening--perhaps due to the natural feelings of people around the world of wanting peacefulness.

Common Good Will Prevail
We did not grow up with the dream of killing others or being killed, but of bonding with others, and finding unity. All over the world people long for family, for friends, for home--not for blood, not for enemies, not for turmoil. We everywhere are alike in that we want a life of contentment with our loved ones.

These central desires of people around the world indicate that we are more similar than dissimilar. Though anger and disquiet and impulse well up inside all of us, it is peace that nonetheless is more natural to us than is war, and it is peace, not war, that is wanted by people everywhere.

Blind optimism for a peaceful world has its pitfalls. Blind optimism leads to the thinking that is it unnecessary to do the work and endure the grind to make peace happen. But defiant optimism has its strength. Without confidence that we can take steps to move up and that we can take actions to be better neighbors to one another there will be no success story for peace.

The Jewish, Muslim, and Christian religions each pray to the same God. Each, in the Qur'an, the New Testament, and the Talmud, call on their believers to act honorably to their fellow man, to be kind of heart, and to assist the poor, the needy, the aged, the infirm, the widowed, and the orphaned--exactly the type of people war creates--and to treat foreigners fairly and truthfully. Eventually, the common ground of these religions will revail. Eventually, the commonality of mankind will prevail.

The common ground can start to prevail now. For when, in the name of improvement, virtue, and reason, people are killed and wounded and maimed and tortured, the world is diminished. We extract an unspeakable price when we ask men to kill other men. We ask that lives of fellow persons be forfeited. We ask that the lives of the living left behind be shattered. We ask that brothers and sisters forever lose brothers and sisters, that fathers and mothers forever lose sons and daughters, that sons and daughters forever lose fathers and mothers, that friends forever lose friends, that husbands and wives forever lose each other. Neither the living left behind nor those who did the killing are ever the same. If we ever engage in war, we had better be sure.

Media Attention
The bicycle team aims to have this Vatican-Jerusalem-Mecca event for peace filmed by a team of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish film directors of the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Furthermore, the fourteen-day event will be televised throughout Europe and the Middle East. Jewish rabbis, Christian ministers, Catholic priests, Orthodox ministers, and Muslim clerics will all be interviewed by the film crew.

Our Part in the Whole
We as a team, in accomplishing this event, recognize we are just a speck on the earth. Yet by accomplishing it we will attract more specks who will also speak out and campaign for peace in this world. We need all the specks we can get, one by one, to bring about such peace. We are inspired to act by the belief that what already has been said about and what already has been done for peace is still not enough. We believe that the last words about peace have not been said and the last deeds for peace have not been done. Rather, we believe that the words and the deeds for peace are just now starting, and that the best words about peace and the best deeds for peace lay ahead of us. The future is bright with opportunities for peace big opportunites.

For us, it is too easy to blame the world's cruelty and inhumaneness on misguided governments and their inept leaders. As Matthew Miller writes, we also suffer from a crisis of followership and of citizenship, and hence we largely get the governments we deserve.

We are all responsible for the predicament we are in. So, although we on the team don't take ourselves seriously, knowing we have no new or brillant ideas, we take the work and the project seriously. We believe that it is ordinary citizens who are the ones responsible for getting the change they want, not their country's leaders, and that it has always been so. The change to peace will come the same way as came the curtailing of slavery, the expanding of womens' rights, the ending of apartheid, and the stopping of separate status of blacks in the United States--collective work by ordinary people inspired by a distaste for fundamental injustice and the natural wish for justice.

If you want to follow, then allow yourself to be scared into war. Someone will always be there ready to engender fear and tell you that you now are or soon will be under attack, claiming how different "they" are from "us".

And if you want to lead, work for peace. The world is in fact moving in the direction of peace. Peace will be the way of the future. They are not so very different from us, they are like us. They want peace too.

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