All in all I was mostly surprised by how few deaths have ever happened on US soil. Our media instills a level of fear in us that makes it so we can never feel comfortable. Without this instilled fear the American people would never allow US intervention the way they have. But honestly, very few deaths have occurred here, and we are probably the safest country in the world. With this level of intrusion in global politics, I understand that the many people in the world resent the United States. It’s funny, because they, like us, just want to be left alone. The people have lost all power in the world and the power governments of world control everything. It’s sad to think that there are people in the world who hate me for where I was born, because of world politics neither of us will ever have any control over. My only hope is that maybe people in other countries are having the same discussions we’re having in Soc 119.
Another interesting thing about the video was the size of the explosion labeled the invasion of Iraq. I know that the US did not lose a “historically” significant number of troops so why was that explosion as large as it was. I guess when your country is at war with another you will never hear accurate accounts of enemy casualties. I guess it was just surprising to me because similar explosions couldn’t even be linked to such events as the Civil War, and the explosions there had similar magnitude to the deaths in Japan during WW2. Maybe the video was a little inaccurate but it seemed to me that the Iraq War caused a lot more death than has been shown by the media.
When I first started this video I was interested in the early years, but it didn’t seem like things really heated up until after the 1500s. I think much of this was due to European conquest, along with the growth of the Spanish and English navies. Watching this video I came to the realization that the last 100 years have been characterized by wars and conflicts that are no longer localized, but are relevant on a global scale. In recent years I’ve came to the realization that since the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, the United States has almost always been the aggressor. Post-1900 the only explosions in the United States were due to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. This is interesting to me because I used to view the United States as a force of good in the world. With little to no aggression on our own soil, how can our country justify the last 100 years of interference in global politics.
Maybe it’s because we virtually eliminated the Native Americans. We put them on their plots of land verifiably exiling them from society. Mainstream society forgot about the people that were wiped out, and so we don’t even think we have a reason to feel guilty. The more I think about it the more I’m disgusted. I used the think the United States was the bringer of peace in the world, but the more things I learn about our history the more I realize that everything is a pattern. The United States is a country that has gained everything by taking from others. A contemporary example is our conquest of the Middle East for oil. The only explanation for our interference in the world is the need for the resources of others. The land we stole from the Native Americans is the first in a long line transgressions that can only be explained as an inherent, and constant lust for the resources of others throughout this nations history.
This may not seem to be genocide, but with the conditions we forced the Native Americans to live in, disease was inevitable in many circumstances. In the end, I guess that there’s no real way that we can justify the means with which we acquired the land we now call home. We may have won our independence from Britain, but the taste of that victory certainly sours when it’s realized that we imposed a more brutal and violent tyranny on the Native Americans than can be found almost anywhere else in history. When Sam was talking about white guilt I couldn’t help but think to myself why this concept really doesn’t apply to Native Americans. It seems that when the civil rights movement happened and all men achieved equality, the Native Americans were forgotten about.
I was glad to hear Sam talk about mass genocide of the Native Americans over the span of hundreds of years because I’ve always felt it’s an area of my education that high school history class seemed to skip over. My viewpoint when I learned about this as a kid was that the United States always acted in the right way. When a child learns about wars it’s always the United States as the good guys and the other guys as bad, or misguided. However, when you look back on our country’s brief but bloody history you’ll discover that oftentimes the United States is the aggressor. In the case of the American Indians, our founding fathers were not only the aggressor, but seemingly eliminated Native Americans systematically. It all began with the diseases that the Europeans brought to America. Some estimates I’ve read online have stated that 70-80 percent of the deaths of Native Americans in the 500 years following their arrival can be attributed to disease.
It is a social norm that I’ve seen from Middle School, where every difference at all was magnified; to college, where differences are accepted and is a place where races intermingle, but students still maintain their social groupings of close friends seemingly by race. The point I want to make is that Penn State should be less concerned with grouping races together, like in Pennypacker, and more concerned with working towards a Penn State being a place where any race can feel comfortable. Penn State could be a place where colored tour groups and separated living arrangements aren’t necessary. In a truly diverse place, culture is abundant and black, brown, white, and yellow all blend together into a true “Penn State Family”.
This has to affect how a colored person thinks, even their thought process. Getting on the bus, it’s ninety percent white, and they don’t know who these people are, the way they think. Penn State implied a diversity that the school simply doesn’t have to offer, compounded by the inability of someone of the colored community, with a statistically lower income, to afford a college experience and elite education that, though deteriorating, is still the number one major at Penn State. So what would you think? Myself, as a half Lebanese half Scottish typical white mutt, with all the privileges that accompany my unearned, undeserving, thoroughly unappreciated standing in the metaphorical hierarchy of “American” culture; I empathize with Penn State students that gravitate towards the comfort of race and culture similar to their own.
Sam always points out in lecture how we sit in our little groups and we all hang out with people of our own race. My first day at Penn State I learned that Pennypacker was “the black dorm”. Does Penn State University not realize that separating students in this way the minute they get to school may make them feel more comfortable, but is also what keeps certain races sticking together in their groups. I remember from a discussion group I participated in during my time in Sociology 001 last spring that the other black students in the group talked about how they were always separated from the white students on tours. Some of these students were bused from Philadelphia and said they were always in all black tour groups. They described a situation that sounded to me like Penn State separating the colored people and the white people even when they are simply touring the school. But how does this affect these students that go from the idea of an environment that consists of their own race to one that includes many more white people than they’ve probably ever seen before? Sure in Pennypacker they’re comfortable and secluded, but walking through campus it’s a sea of blue and “white”.
Penn State is a place that I definitely expected to be more culturally and racially diverse than it actually ended up being. Oddly, I lived in Pennypacker, which is notorious for being the African American dorm, and it hardly seemed to be really that diverse at all. If I were to guess, I would say that there was a 60:40 ratio of white people to colored people in the dorm. When the rest of the dorms in East Halls are considered to be mostly white, is this really a representation of Penn State’s population. Even the idea of sticking all of the colored people on scholarship in Pennypacker seems a little ridiculous. By separating them in this way it increases the separation, almost segregation, of the colored community in East Halls from the white community.
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