“No you can’t touch the dinosaur bones!” I insisted.
“But we live in a free country.” Makil protested.
“Living in a ‘free country’ means that we have freedom of religion and speech and the power to vote to change things. Being free does not mean that you can touch the dinosaur bones,” I explained. “If everyone touched them, they would disintegrate or people would pull on them and the structures would fall apart. You have the freedom to go to a public school that takes you to a museum where you have the freedom to learn about dinosaurs and see an amazing collection of fossils, you should appreciate that instead of pouting because you can’t touch them.”
My argument all made complete sense to me, but Malik didn’t care. The Natural History Museum has obviously encountered many Maliks because they have one big fossilized bone that people can touch.
American mass mentality/propoganda is heavily geared towards fighting for freedom, but looking at photos from the anti-Bush protests in Brazil, I began thinking about all the countries that probably want to be free of American influence. To free themselves of a past that includes our intervention in their political, financial, and cultural affairs. Meanwhile the people of South America are free to make Bush look like Hitler, to denounce America’s foreign policy, and to resanctify holy Mayan ruins after Bush leaves.
Over the summer I considered joining the Coast Guard and went so far as to take a military physical. I spent the morning in a room full of 17-20 year old boys, some of whom had just spent their first night away from home. They were eager to go and fight for America and her causes. They did not have moral reservations about the war in Iraq, were eager to handle a gun or a helicopter. In contrast to the views of the vast majority of my friends, this was startling. I had forgotten/not realized that a significant portion of this nations’ people saw our actions in the Middle East as appropriate, or even vital. I was upset that night by the comments of the girls sitting behind me at the movie theatre that night when the ad for the marines came on, but I already knew deep down that the armed forces were not for me.
There is much that I believe in, but I’m trying to decide what I consider worth fighting for and then how to fight for it. I’m not going to fight to touch the dinosaurs, to expel Bush’s influence from the Brazil, or for the oil of an Arab land. But right now I’m not fighting to end the Iraq war or the genocides of Africa, to educate the international masses, or to treat legal and illegal immigrants as full fledged human beings with all their inalienable rights. And those are the things I believe are worth fighting for. In some ways I’ve begun to fight for peace by responding with strong passivism when Tommy tries to barge through my classroom door cursing and threatening me instead of building the altercation. I have made a long internal list about reasons to scale down our presence in Iraq. But now is the time to pick my battles and win the war to end war and more.
I ha to explain this to my class the other day when I said that a business owner has the right to toss a patron who is sexually harrassing employees out.
I agree with where you take it, too, about how lots of countries want to get off of our imagainary leish.