This week students have to write about research that has been done about the projects. Projects that are tackling very concrete problems have an easier time doing this. For example, if one’s project stated that world hunger was the biggest problem facing the world today, and that person could relatively easily research world hunger. There are articles, books, and tons of online resources that will provide statistics on world hunger. But for those people who are focusing on a less concrete problem facing the world today, this job becomes much harder. For example if one’s project stated that there is too much hate in the world, that person would have a very hard time researching the topic. Unlike the number of starving people, the number of people who have hate in their heart is not measurable. It is impossible to draw the line that separates dislike and hate. And after that has been solved, how would one know if a person that supposedly had no hate was not just putting on a facade of love to hide his or her hate? To say the least, it would be very difficult to get statistics on hate. So a person with a less concrete topic should use conflicts in which hate is assumed. For example, terrible things like genocide can be used as an example of there being hate in the world. Even though a report involving genocide may not specifically have the word “hate” mentioned once, it is safe to assume that hate was part of the equation.
My project fits into the second category. My project states that there is not enough unity in the world today. Even though there are many online articles and other online sources that discus unity in the world, many of them are not very helpful because I am not sure of their credibility. Secondly by simply looking at the general international affairs of the United States of America, one can easily discover that there is a general lack of unity. The United States of America itself was founded in unified conditions. For example, people were not unified in the least bit. Native Americans were being killed, Africans were enslaved, and people were killed during the Salem witch trials. There is no telling what kind of place the United States of America would be now if all of the people living on its land where unified under a common goal of respecting and loving one another. It is hard to imagine what the culture would be like because it would be a good mixture of many more things. The Native American culture would most likely dominate since it was already established and running. There are so many Native American tribes and cultures that are now lost forever due to a lack of unity between two groups of peoples. The African salves would have been allowed to practice their religions and beliefs resulting in a more African culture. If there was unity in those times, the United States of America would be much less separated by color lines. And if people understood each other’s differences enough to prevent the Salem witch trials, no telling how many more people would be here today because they were killed for being different over this country’s history.
Even though so far all of these things have been about the past, things have not completely changed. There is still a great lack of unity in the United States of America today. Hate-crime statistics distort truth of American tolerance, an article by James Lacey, states that, “Recently released FBI hate-crime data show that crimes against Arabs and Muslims have increased more than 1,500 percent since last year. Presumably this seeming outpouring of ethnic hatred is related directly to the after effects of Sept. 11.” The events of September 11 were very tragic, but the pain is not over. This quotation shows that people are still taking violent action against a specific group of people way after the original event. The people who are suffering from these hate crimes more than likely have no connection with the events that caused the hate. This is a situation that clearly could use some unity. There are people in this country that are committing hate crimes against their fellow Americans. If there was more unity in the world, instead of there being a lot of fighting, there could be a lot of helping. There would be no hate crimes because everyone could be on the same side. Everyone could share a goal of living peacefully and helping out in the community.
The lack of unity caused by hate crimes represent relatively individual problems, one group of Americans hate another group of Americans because they look different or practice a different religion. But there are larger issues that are creating even more disunity than the hate crimes. Many countries do not like the United States of America simply because they believe its citizens have all the wealth and lack any significant moral values. This in itself is creating and perpetuating unity across the globe. To make matters worse, the United States of America is at war in Iraq. The war was initially being fought over weapons of mass destruction. After being at war for much longer than originally anticipated, no weapons of mass destruction have been found. Many countries are looking at this and viewing the United States of America negatively. Since no weapons have been found, other countries are probably thinking that the war was started for other reasons. Reasons that they probably would not believe are substantial enough to start a war over. Although other countries are most likely thinking this, there is concrete evidence of this, but there is evidence that the people that are being invaded have a problem with the United States that will most likely last quite a few generations. Iraqis are not happy that they are being occupied by the United States military. Some Iraqis are so enraged by this occupation that they are creating resistance groups to get the army out of their country. Needless to say this war is creating a lack of unity between two countries that has the potential to last more than a lifetime.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 27th, 2005 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Project Progress, Week 07: Research Stats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.