Can Killing be Justified?

For someone looking in from the outside, I am certain that they would find the recent New York Times article about the soldier who killed five of his comrades in a counseling center at an American military base. I believe, though, someone who is a soldier or has been a soldier in the war and fought has no trouble explaining how something like this could have happened. Even though I have never fought in a war, after our recent unit of War: What is it good for? where we watched some artifacts, I feel like I have more of a clue why something like this could have happened. In the movie Born on Fourth of July, Tom Cruise is fighting in the Vietnam War and while he is retreating from a village that is under attack he is shooting enemy soldiers. Over a ridge, outlined by the sun comes a soldiers, gun raised and shooting. With the camera angle shown (from the perspective of Tom Cruise), it is impossible to tell the soldier apart from the enemy. With only a split second to make a decision, Tom shoots the soldier, killing him. Later he finds out that it was one of his comrades that he killed, but there is no way Tom could have been blamed for it, because every other soldier in the same situation would have done the same thing. Although this case in the military base was more intentional, I think the same reasoning applies. The soldier was obviously affected by the war because he was in a counseling center, and knowing a bit about the subject because I wrote my junior theme on the topic, the patient probably suffered from PSD. Patients with PSD (post dramatic stress disorder) always seem on edge because they relate everything to war. For example, thunder could be mistaken for a mortar shell. This soldier in the counseling center could have associated something the five other soldiers had or wore as something the enemy would have had or worn, and thinking he only had a split second between life and death, acted quickly with his instincts-to kill. I do not think the soldier should be prosecuted or held accountable for his actions because he acted that way because what war has done to him, and I believe any other soldier would have acted the same way. I think the bigger issue/question is how was a mentally instable soldier in a counseling center have access to a gun? I think we need to be more aware of the possibility of something like this happening, and take actions to prevent it, instead of putting the blame solely on the soldier who made the misjudgment.

Just Random? Maybe Not...

While on the New York Times website, I found something that immediately caught my attention. It was an article about Mike Kelleher’s job. He is the director of White House Correspondence, who sorts through the tens of thousands of letter received a day at the White House. I thought this was interesting because recently in class we have been reading letters sent to FDR and one of my more recent blog posts was about a letter sent to President Bush. I always wondered if they just picked the letters at random to show the president because I figured he receives far too many a day to read each one. It is reassuring to see that they aren’t just picked at random or let the president only read the ones that compliment him; there is actually someone who chooses the letters he thinks the president should most likely read.

School's Out!...Forever

While flipping through the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune’s sports section looking for high school baseball scores from Saturday to see if we would move up in the rankings, I found something much more interesting. For our Privilege and Poverty unit, we brainstormed what characterizes a life of privilege. One of the characteristics we decided on was access to a quality education. I have always thought that was available to everyone through high school, because every community has a school close by that a kid has access to. That age may have passed through because in the sports section I found an article discussing an up and coming problem: school closings. This article was about Driscoll, a school that is going to close after this school year because of a trend of less students enrolling each year. Unless parents can raise a million dollars by Monday, the school will be forced to close. The smaller amount of students enrolling each year has been a trend since the economic downturn, which doesn’t give the school enough money to operate. Whether it was kids not being able to commute to school and chose a school close by or parents not being able to pay for book and other school necessities, it’s affecting Driscoll immensely. What I see as the bigger problem is that this will be taking away one of the characteristics of privilege, access to a quality education, from about 280 kids (the amount that will be attending the school next year if it doesn’t close). I believe this raises the question of should people be denied access to a privileged life because of other people’s poverty? I’m sure this will not affect some kids, because they will be able to commute to a different school. But what about the few that have parents working long hours and don’t have the time to drive them to a school farther away and the money to pay for a taxi or bus each day? Is this fair to them when they did nothing to cause the school to close? I certainly don’t think so and am interested to see if the government does anything to help situations like this, because they did with major corporations like AIG who didn’t have enough money to operate. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, because I am sure there will be many more scenarios just like this one in the future.

Babysitter for Hire

While on the Washington Post’s web site, I found an interesting letter to the president from June of 2007 about what the writer believes the US’s role in Iraq should be. Although it is outdated, I thought it brought up some interesting points and relates heavily to our new unit about war. The topic about whether or not the US should be in Iraq and what their role there should be has been debated heavily over the past couple of years. In class last week when we were looking at political cartoons, one stuck out to me that reminded me of this exact issue. The cartoon had Uncle Sam holding up Cuba, the Philippians, and some other countries we were taking care of after a war (in the form of babies) like he was babysitting them. The caption of the cartoon read along the lines of “how some people view America’s role in other countries after the war”. I found this very interesting that America was being portrayed as the babysitter and thought that this was how many people viewed America now with Iraq. We have gone in and freed them from Saddam Hussein and are still there, helping them create a stable country. If we pull out immediately, all of our work and lives lost will go for nothing, yet we can’t babysit them forever. There needs to be a solution in between. I thought this article presented the problem perfectly saying America has lived by the motto “you break it, you own” and that shouldn’t always be the case yet also realizes that abandoning Iraq suddenly is unrealistic too. The writer’s solution was “a limited deliberate drawdown of our military men and women and a redeployment of the forces remaining in the region to areas where they can more efficiently and effectively carry out a clearly defined mission”. I thought this was interesting, and in a way being done today. This is one of many opinion pieces I have read about US’s involvement in Iraq, and thought that this was one of the more interesting ones, and thought I would share it because it relates a lot with our new unit.

Truly Role Models?

While on the New York Times website, I saw a case of another stupid decision. This article was about how Japan’s finance minister was resigning after reportedly showing up at a news conference drunk. This case is just one of many where a respectable man has gotten in trouble for making stupid decisions. We saw Michael Phelps get caught smoking a bong, Chris Brown facing charges for abusing his girlfriend, and now this. Sometimes I wonder what is going threw these people’s heads when they make such stupid decisions. They have more than anyone could wish for, yet they go out and risk all of it doing stupid stuff like this. Sometimes I really wonder whether the people we view as “role models” really deserve it.

Just a Matter of Time...

While on the New York Times website, I found an interesting article about how there is still discrimination problems in Japan. Although it isn’t anything like what the United States had with blacks and slavery, the discrimination in Japan still reminded me of the United States dark past. Japan’s social class called the buraku still face discrimination today because they are thought to be, by Buddhist beliefs, nonhuman because of their “unclean actions”. They were put in separate neighborhoods and given a worse education. Japan has been following the same timeline the United States have when establishing Civil rights acts and such. The only step Japan hasn’t taken that America has is electing a leader from the discriminated class. They have a buraku, Mr. Nonaka, high up in the government, but he still hasn’t reached prime minister, which would show Japan doesn’t discriminate against the buraku anymore. When reading this article, I thought about Obama’s election and how much progress it meant for our nation, and how other nations aren’t ready to make that step yet, like Japan. I also thought about what it takes for people to realize that you shouldn’t discriminate against people, whether they are black or buraku. Huck Finn came to mind, and how Huck had to go on the river with Jim and get to know Jim as a person outside of his expected role in the community to realize that blacks aren’t any different than whites. I’m realize it takes a long time for enough people that can make a difference in Japan to have this one on one experience with a buraku to realize they are the same as everyone else. But that’s why I believe that Japan will make the same progress we, American’s, have made this year by electing president Obama. It just takes a matter of time.

Is Getting Shot at Really Fun?

In a critical essay on The Red Badge of Courage, Sharon Cumberland talks about the difference between a realistic and romantic telling of a war story. I found it very interesting and even comical how, while researching for my junior theme, topics we are discussing in class was discussed in documents I found. It really does prove that Lawler and Logan control the universe. But the point that Cumberland was making was that The Red Badge of Courage tells a war story from the realistic point of view, where war is not glorified and soldiers have problems. Cumberland states, “A romantic telling of this story would have emphasized courage, heroism, and the glorious death rather than cowardice, fear, and rotten corpses. A romantic telling of this story might also have implied that the soldiers were dying in a glorious cause of which God approved, and their souls were going straight to heaven.” I found this very interesting because I have read both types of books, and considered both ones believable, and never questioned how they contradicted each other. I started to think how war is looked at nowadays and I believe it is still romanticized. I think army and navy commercials do this the most, where they show the exciting parts of being in the army or navy, and completely skip over the hard, challenging parts. In one commercial, it tries to draw you in by showing exciting footage of people riding motor boats and jumping out of helicopters. The last picture you see reads, “Navy, accelerate your life” implying that if you join the navy, you’re life will become exciting. These skips over the hard training and work involved even to get to the point where you can jump out of a helicopter. I have a friend whose older brother enrolled in the navy, and dropped out after a month because it was so hard and, as he said, “inhumane”. This shows that the navy romanticizes what they do because it’s not solely excitement and glory, there is also hard work and dedication, neither of which they show in their commercials because those aspects of the navy are unappealing.