Perspectives

Documenting struggle is easy to do. It is easy to sit down in front of a computer, write down all the things that make your blood boil, and walk away satisfied. There are countless trials and tribulations and everyone wants to get them down on paper, or vent to their best friend, in the smartest, most emotional way possible. But in the end, Man was born, Man lives, Man dies, and its all Vanity.

There once was a guy named Joe, and Joe was a 14 year old. He lived with his mother and baby sister, and there was a war raging in Joe's country. Joe was part of the militia, and was called out of his neighborhood to hide in a town away from the advancing troops. While Joe was away, the enemy came into his community, and without warning, burned all the playgrounds, destroyed all the power and water systems, killed everyone in his family, and everyone related to Joe in the general area. When Joe returned he found his life was no longer the same. These enemies of his country brutallu murdered his family, and Joe was going to get revenge. So he became a ruthless hunter of the enemy. He would have his revenge, and eventually he won the war. His family never found redemption except for his own personal revenge during the war.

Change the ethnicity, change the battlefeild, change the winners, and you are still left with the same atrocities. Murder on each side of the situation, and wrongdoing and grief from death at every turn. The horrors in My Lai couldnt be any worse to fathom is I wasn't surrounded by it every single week day in and day out. In order to look into an inquiry like this, I think the more troubling thing is, that we have had to look into what it is like to think like a murderer. It is true that in a war it is required to kill, but to know how to inquire into these things properly, I feel ive had to dive into the mind of a killer., which has been not so much an enjoyable experience.

In passing

I feel like the last few weeks have been a really huge dissapointment. Not only had I lost faith in my own abilities to move forward and keep learning, but I also lost faith in the idea that Truth In Society was relevant at all to my university experience. With that being said, we stopped reading and doing reports on what we read, and it was apparent to me why we were doing what we were doing. We simply dug deep into reading in order to have a choice in what we wanted to tackle for feasability studies.

Now, I have just one thing to say, and I will do it openly, and try to keep it constructive. Our abilities in this class, to understand its goals, to get the work done on time and done well, and our overall capabilities to learn are just as good as any other person in this university. I feel like the professors treat us with disrespect, and perhaps we deserve it for losing faith in the process, but the violent reactions, and consistant cursing tends to wear on me. I have been in some very akward, frustrating, on the brink of losing my mind kind of stressful situations at work, but I never resort to cursing at my coworkers, and I especailly dont do it to my pupils. I use to teach people how to swim as a lifegaurd, and also to do first aid, if I swore at my students for not putting in the effort, I would get fired, that is the bottom line. I do not suggest that anything like that should happen here, and we are not 14 year olds learning CPR, but the idea is still there. It is unproffessional and we are not in any way professionals in the area of learning. We all struggle, and we all get frustrated, and being crude and using foul language is never the way to handle a situation, no matter how frustrating it might seem.
I realize I asked a stupid question I should have never asked, but honestly, I dont do bibliographies well, I put a lot of work into the report I did, and there is knowone that can take that away from me. I truely feel that the work I have been doing on my feasability report, has taught me more about the Vietnam war than I ever knew before. I have found faith in the process again, and no matter what stupid questions I ask, or how dissapointing it might seem that I have not put the same effort into this symester as i did in the last, I am proud of the work I am producing.

Death is tricky. It really is. It comes when you need it the least. It is always complicated, it is always difficult to accept, and it is always easier when its someone else going through it. Those families in My Lai are gone. They are voiceless. They are a group of people taken from this earth in the midst of conflict that was going on around them. I feel like as a human being, death is a regular part of life itself. With life there is always death, and no matter how wrong this massacre was, it still happened and can never be taken back. So we can only look to the ones who are still alive. The ones who pulled the trigger. So the question is, should death bring death? Should the killers be killed. Should the world just forget and move on? I believe such questions are never really answered, you simply just accept the decision made at the end of the trial. Move on with your life. Take a picture of the graves, if there are any, leave some flowers, and make your popcorn and watch Survivor.

Opinion vs Belief

Through Learning this week, I have come to the conclusion that I must face facts, and act in order to learn. So I will be drinking a Grape Soda at the start of Aquinas and observing my bodies reaction.