Where do we get our opinions from?
Well, I think that we get our opinions from our own beliefs and feelings and knowledge, but our opinions are also very heavily influenced by our parents and our friends-- people we look up to, people we believe in. And this is the partisanship of humanity: Humans are trusting. Humans (for the most part) want to trust, want to believe everything, want the world to be unlying and pure and pretty and true (and at least at the beginning they believe that it will be). Who wants a fake world? Life is not made of paper and plastic lies held up with toothpicks.
But, how do we know anything is true? How do we even know that when we sit down to watch the news, that things will be true? Well, we don't, not entirely. We can never be completely sure. Because though people like to trust, people also like to use that trust, to corrupt the trust.
I trust in my family, and my friends. I trust in myself. andin this trust and this influence they have on me, I tend to see things the way that they do. I tend to like eating seafood. I tend to like wearing converse sneakers. I like to make up silly words. I tend to be of a more politically liberal mind. And I don't know if I would do those things, would be this same person that likes seafood if it weren't for them, because they are a part of me and I trust them and their judgement.
Being seperated from them and their opinions, and being suddenly in an entirely different country gives you different people to trust, different opinions to draw on, and different eyes to see through.
And here's the thing. If I were in America at the time that Osama Bin Laden died, with my friends, my family, and all the people who's eyes are easy for me to see out of, I would have high-hived someone, I would have probably whooped. Awesome! This dude, who killed thousands of people that one day that I was in first grade and ruined storytime is FINALLY dead. That guy who I can only think of with the undertones of kindergarten memories turned sour: sitting on the bus next to my dosing father as our class took a trip to New York City, my first trip, and I craned my neck to see those two ginormous buildings far in the distance. They were bigger than big bird, they were taller than my dad times five thousand, but they were just dominos we stacked on one another, and another, and another. They fall just as easily. And the sound of his name has meant nothing to me than a New York City I barely knew before it came crashing to it's knees. A name I have heard since my childhood as frequently, or perhaps more frequently than Bugs Bunny. A name that order the death of thousands of innocent, unaware Americans who just on their way to work, to get money, to feed their family, to live their life.
But here, I'm not so sure. Here we talk more abouthow he wasn't armed, how he was with his own family, living peacefully in a house in a country that America has no (or should not have) power over to just seize residents and kill them point blank. They talk about how no one really wanted him anymore anyway, how he wasn't hurting anything or anyone. they talk about how his wife ran at the man holding the gun shielding her husband and was accidentally shot in the leg. And I wonder what she said to them in her language, if she pleaded that they let him go, that she loved him, if they understood her at all. I wonder what his children thought as they shot him, if later in life they will always remember that day. I don't know. And neither does any one else really. No one cared to ask.
Is freedom what the USA stands for? Freedom for them to carry their revenge thousands of miles to a country they have no place to be in, let alone give orders in. And....
I don't know what to think.
But whatever happens, if we tell them that they need to take the hatred off their shoulders, that means that we must do the same.
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