Posted: 5/3/2005 9:49:49 PM EDT
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I'm back in college now, trying to get a dgree to make a little more $$. I have to make a presentation tomorrow in front of my class of students mostly 5 years younger than me about "something difficult for me to discuss". Here's what I put together, lemme know what you guys think and if you find any mistakes. Talking about difficult subjects has never really been a huge problem for me. I mean, I don’t exactly open up to just anyone about anything, so at first I thought there was little for me to discuss when asked to share something “difficult for me to talk about”. But then I thought more about it, and as I stared at the book getting frustrated I had an epiphany -- the example used was the war in Iraq. Something I find difficult to discuss. There’s more than one reason it’s difficult for me to talk about it. I guess the main part being is it’s something I feel so strongly about. And when people disagree with me on the war in Iraq, well then I tend to get irritated at them for not seeing things my way. Don’t get the wrong idea, I like to discuss religion, politics, basketball teams, whatever. And normally I can walk away thinking to myself, “I can see where they are coming from,” even if that person and I still don’t see eye to eye. I normally really enjoy an open discussion -- but not about a topic that hits home quite so hard as this one. I get riled up about Iraq. Obviously when 9/11happened, I was angry. So the war in Afghanistan was no problem. Everyone seemed to agree with it, they attacked us, lets get them back and kick some butt. It makes sense. Iraq was different. I think the official reason for the war was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Whether or not he did really doesn’t matter to me. The fact remains, we’ll never know how many of his own people he killed without any sort of punishment. For decades he and his cronies were lining up everyone that wasn’t part of his political affiliation and gassing or shooting them. The western powers did nothing. Since the official war ended, there’s been over 80 mass graves discovered, each with hundreds of bodies in them, including women and children. And they’re still finding more, with a recent find being uncovered just last weekend. Let me give you a little side story. There was a kid named Richard at my high school. He was physically handicapped, but inside his crippled body was a brain that was as sharp as a tack. I tried to be friends with him, but I think he was so used to being made fun of that it was impossible to get close to him. Well one day I saw a group of my friends from the football team laughing hysterically. As I got closer to see what was so funny, my smile turned to a grimace when I saw what they were doing. They had glued quarters to the cement floor by the vending machines, and were laughing and elbowing each other and pointing as they watched Richard try and scrape the permanently attached quarters off the ground, trying to ignore their antics so he could get some quarters to buy a snack. Here’s what bothers me most -- I did nothing. I walked away. It wasn’t worth it to me at the time. The way I justified it to myself was I might possibly lose some friends for sticking up for a kid that I didn’t even know. To me, that’s exactly the way the war is. Those Iraqis weren’t strong enough to defend themselves, so Saddam got to kill as many as he wanted to, thinking he’d get away with it. It was America’s moral obligation to get in there and save those innocent people, even if everybody else in the world wanted to look the other way and pretend like nothing was happening. Just like I did in high school. |