Response to Wednesday

I thought that the video we watched called Control room was very interesting. Obviously along with any other war the war in Iraq has caused many different types of controversies. Aljazeera’s media portrays the Americans in the worst way possible and are completely biased on their side of the war. The Marines that were being interviewed seemed pissed off about this but we do the same thing and we only make it look like the Iraqi’s are the bad people when I am sure that we have done some bad things too. This is not a clean war it is a messy one and I think that it is only logic that we are going to portray the news to make the opposing side look bad because the media wants Americans to look innocent and the citizens to support the war. When I saw the video clip of the Americans barging in homes of innocent civilians you can really see both sides of the war because us living in America we only see one side of the story. For every story there are two sides and I think that is important and a duty of ours to research on our own and get a clue of what is really happening on both sides before being so opinionated. Another thing that sparked my attention in this film was when the Marine said that when the clips of the POW’s were leaked it made him extremely angry but we have done things like that to them and of course it is not going to affect us as much when we see goory images of dead Iraqi soldiers like it would affect us if we saw dead American soldiers because that is how we are trained to think.

            Another thing that I liked about this class period was the activity that we did at the end where we got to tally up all of the amenities that we had in our lives. It is eye opening to see how fortunate that we really are. I went to Haiti and did mission work over the summer and to see the way that we live versus the way that Haitians live has changed the way I view my life. You do not realize how fortunate you are because we are surrounded by people that have the same amenities that we do so you don’t really see it until you go somewhere else like Haiti where you see people who have tarps on top of sticks for a house. I really liked this activity!