Censorship, Invasion, and China

It's always bound to happen when my older brother comes home. We get in an inevitable argument. Sometimes it's over things as trivial as who does more work in the family, and other times it's actually an intelligent discussion. Snow that trapped the family at home on Saturday night was the perfect situation to begin an argument.

Jake began by stating that the government should have the power to censor what stories come out of the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, he argued, that technically isn't American soil, so individual rights of freedom of speech don't exist over seas. I argued that the problem wasn't the simple presence of journalists in the war zones, but rather the fact that their stories were examples of lazy journalism. Their stories based largely on opinions, wouldn't even earn a passing grade in my reporting class.

From that argument we went on to discuss why an international course is required in college and not one in production agriculture. After all, the only thing standing between the U.S. and a potential take over (beside nuclear weapons) is the amount of food we produce. We only need to call upon the countries that we feed with crops produced in America to fight as our allies, or risk losing their food supply.

Finally, we turned to China. In every class I hear how the amount of debt we owe the Asian country will cause them to take over our country, but Jake used a simple analogy to explain why they never will. If you produce bulls, and only one large rancher purchases the majority of your bulls each year, you aren't going to buy out that rancher and lose your customer.

The point of this whole blog isn't to start some arguments, but rather to urge you to get an opinion. This argument was passionate, and we both had used some facts to back up our side. Too many of my friends simply choose not to care. They are too worried about matters in their lives to look at a bigger picture, and simply take what they are told at face value. Evaluating the news and politics critically is incredibly important, after all, we are the next generation of decision makers, and the events and policies of today will drastically affect our future.

'till the cows come home,
Ellie