World Issues has been a very interesting course full of many miscellaneous topics. However, one central them has been connected to the many topics that we have discussed throughout the year: violence. From the US Drone Strikes to Poverty to the Connecticut school shooting to more recent events such as the Boston Bombing, all of these have the common them of violence. Some topics do not have violence written in their name because they are gateways issues that can result in it. For example; marijuana, poverty and society becoming too sexy. Those listed can all lead to violence.
When we did the debate as a class on legalizing marijuana, it seemed as if their was more to be said about the cons of the drug. One of the big topics thought was brought up was how it is a gateway drug to lead to other drugs. Violence is high in the drug business and if marijuana gets legalized, the violence rate will go up. Doing drugs can alter someone's minds and make them do things that they would never do sober. They might get influenced with the wrong group of people where violence is a way of life and if one of them is not happy with someone, violence may be used as a way of taking care of the situation.
When poverty was briefly talked about in class and when I researched the topic in depth for my ISU, I found that poverty is a root of becoming a terrorist. Once again this is showing the theme of violence. If children grow up without an education and with parents without an education, they will not know what is right or wrong in the society of developed countries. In other words, the person might think that the easiest way to solve a severe issue is violence. In our society, that is defiantly not the way to resolve an issue.
The one class when we talked about our society becoming too sexualized and how pornography can ruin a person's life also relates back to violence. If a person becomes "overly" sexualized, their mind becomes warped into thinking things that once were not acceptable are now acceptable. Pornography changes the way that man thinks of "normal" sex. He then may become violent if he doesn't get exactly what he wants because his idea of normal sex is much higher than in reality.
In conclusion, all of these topics plus even more that we discussed this year help embody the them of violence in today's world issues.
Not only did we discuss current events but we also studied the Arab Israeli conflict in depth! That was my favourite part of the course.
ReplyDeleteI personally believe that the theme of this course was to allow us to have a better sense on what is happening in our world today. We live in a society where we thrive, we are privileged and lucky to be able to attend school but that's not the case for everyone. There are millions of children and adults out there in the world who cannot go to school, who don't have access to clean water everyday and who can't live a life without fear. i do agree though with your thought of violence, almost every topic we talked about had violence within it so it would make sense that it would be the theme.
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