Free Reading Post 1

I am going to be reading the book The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell. It is about a young soldier’s tour in Afghanistan. It is his story of the horrors he faces while on tour. This book got me thinking. I want to join the army after college to fight in Afghanistan. I’ve seen the position of a soldier glorified in commercials and on television. I would like to have the honor of being a member of the armed forces very much. I would be a national hero. I would fight for America and all my friends and family. I know the things I would see there would be disturbing and awful, they might even haunt me forever. However, I do not fully understand the true weight of what I would see. I am told that it will change my life, but there is now real way for me to understand what they mean. The only way for me to truly understand the horror of war is to experience it for myself. I think that it will be easy and I will enjoy it. I have a feeling that I am wrong and my gut instinct tell me that I am, but because of the media glorifying war I cant. I want to be one of the men in the marine commercials, twirling my rifle on the crest of a mountain.  It is very unlike that I will ever be able to do that. Movies like Blackhawk Down showed disturbing images in combat scenes, but they never really sunk in. My thoughts were that it’s only a movie and if it was true it would never happen to me. I feel like I am invincible, like most people in America. Obviously, I am not, but I cannot help it. America has allowed me to grow up without the terror that others face daily. I think that fighting would be fun, that I can handle the boiling hot weather in the desert, sleepless nights would be easy. I know I’m wrong, but I cannot shake the ideas engraved in my head. The media is to blame for that. They glorify war as well as being a warrior. I hope that this book will help me truly understand what I want to get myself into.

Speech Codes

At Michigan State University, their handbook states that all students must be able to learn in an environment free from emotional stressors and any form of physical or emotional harassment will not be tolerated. They have strict codes about sexual harassment and what qualifies as such. Activities, even if they are legal, that create stress upon student will not be tolerated. Verbal and non-verbal harassment will cause a student to be closely monitored. Michigan State holds its student to rules that do not exist in the real world. These rules will impair my ability to express my views and feelings about the world. They say that they take pride in freedom of speech, but by enforcing their speech codes they contradict themselves. I do not view the school with such high thoughts as I did before researching their policies. I see them as another form of authority abusing their power and trying to find ways around the Constitution and Bill of Rights. I believe that the universities speech codes are unconstitutional and infringe on the basic rights given to the US citizen. In the real world we can express ourselves however we see fit as long as we don’t harm others. The school system is trying to change this and restrict free speech to anything that cannot be found as offensive to any specific group. I support their hopes of a stress free learning environment, but I do not support restricting free speech to do so.

9/11

I would like to start off by thanking everyone who helped during 9/11 and the weeks after. Also i would like to let everyone who lost somebody in the attacks and the wars following know that they are in my prayers and thoughts. I believe that on a political level, we are handling this situation completely wrong. Terrorism is not an act of war; it is a crime and therefore should be treated as one. It is true that the attacks on America were on a scale so large that it has never been seen before. America, stunned by the realization that we are not invincible declared war on Afghanistan ignoring the advice of its allies. We declared war on a country whose majority of people did not have anything to do with the attacks on America. We wanted to find the people responsible and in doing so we attacked and blew up their country. Isn’t that what they did to us? Are we terrorists on an even larger scale?  By declaring war on terrorists, we made them into warriors, glorified position in any culture. We were upset with a group of people so we destroy what they have as they did to us. Militias in Afghanistan fought with us because we are ruining their country just as we did when they attacked. Are we really that different from the cowards who kill innocent people to prove a point that America cannot and will not ever understand? England has lowered tensions with the IRA through diplomatic means. They were treated as criminals and as people with power and agreements were made. England did not declare war on the whole country because of the actions of a few people. They made resolutions through talk. America should learn from the past and see that we also need to try diplomatic means. The retired head of the counter-terrorism branch of MI-5 says that the war on terror is as productive as the war on drugs and will never be won through violence.

Freedom of Speech

Freedom of speech among students in America is too restrictive. Americans are protected by the Constitution and it is not American to limit any freedom given by it. Students attend school to prepare to live in the real world. In school they are taught to be separate individuals. By restricting their ability to act as such, schools actually discourage individualism and free thinking. Schools ask children to turn their shirt inside out if it is “inappropriate”. For example, a student is wearing a shirt with their baseball team on it. The shirt contains the sponsors of the team and they include a beer company. There is a small patch on the back of the shirt with the company’s name. A school official sees the patch and asks the student to change his shirt. If school is preparing students to live in the real world then they should be able to dress like people in the real world.

Messages that are seen as going against the schools messages are also not allowed. For example, a student wears a shirt that says “Legalize Marijuana” and school officials ask the student to change his shirt and maybe even suspend the student because their shirt goes against the anti-drug message of the school. This is not constitutional because the student is displaying his opinion on a topic currently being debated in a peaceful way. Schools are upset because they engrave the idea that drugs are bad into students’ minds and anything that contradicts that is not allowed.

Schools limit the right to free speech to help further their goals and not for the better of the students. In the Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines (1989), students were going to wear black armbands to school to protest the war. The school found out their plan and outlawed armbands in school. I believe that their protest upset the school officials and they made a rule against it. The students wore their armbands anyways and were suspended. In court it was found that the school had no right to limit the students’ speech.

Restricting free speech seems to cause more trouble than having students held to the same standards as everyone else.

Peace,

Syotos