Welcome

I’ve always considered myself a well rounded person (both academically and socially) so it took me till the end of my sophomore year to decide on a history major. I was never really a history buff in high school, but I slowly found out it was the only major at school I was able to enjoy. Some people find history completely boring, however if you look close enough it’s easy to see that history is in everything (including issues, concerns and world events) around us.

The first concern I would like to not only talk about but learn more about are the conflicts going on in the Middle East. That includes (but certainly isn’t limited to) the War on Terrorism and the Arab-Israeli conflict. It’s hard to think about how globalized and culturally assimilated the United States is (and how fortunate we are) when the Arab nations and Israel are still fighting for the same thing they’ve been fighting over for thousands of years: their land or “olive trees”; more specifically their history.

I hate jumping on bandwagons, and I admit I knew virtually nothing about this until seeing Al Gore’s movie, but after seeing An Inconvenient Truth, it’s hard not to recognize global warming as literally a GLOBAL problem. We are fortunate to live in the free world we do today (at least in the US), and it only got that way because the people before us left it that way. Although my personal volunteering resume isn’t something to brag about, I am of the belief that our generation shouldn’t leave the world the same as how we found it, but better. To me denying global warming is just as insane as the people who tried to deny the Holocaust. Hopefully this issue will be looked into even further in the future.

The last issue I’m concerned about is the genocide that STILL goes on today. The first that come to mind are the conflicts in Darfur between the Janjaweed military and the fighting rebel groups, and the conflict in Rwanda (which President Clinton did apologize for not responding to their situation in a timely manner.) It’s also hard to believe that the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua happened less than forty years ago.

I think all of these issues are important. Our country is already so well put together (relatively speaking) that it’s easy to forget and/or ignore what’s going on around us in the world. I remember when I heard about the Virginia Tech shooting I got on Yahoo news to read any information I could. My eyes were immediately attracted to bright about bold letters which stated that seventeen people, and possibly more were dead. Underneath that in a much, much smaller font, was a story about how last night in Baghdad, while I was sleeping or watching sportscenter, 138 men, women, and children had died. 138.