I don't believe my generation of U.S. citizens, brought up with the belief that you can do anything you want but not taught the value of the hard work that goes into achieving those goals, could ever lay down their lives for something they purport to believe in. I myself, don't believe I would lay down my life for an ideal. Of course military types are the exception, but they're crazy anyway:) Case in point, a lot of us feel that the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were sent under false pretenses and are losing their lives in an unjust war. It's tragic! I don't want this to be about Iraq though, what got me thinking is all the unrest in Iran at the moment. Hundreds of thousands of people are marching against the result of their presidential "election". Basically, the old president "won" in a landslide "vote" and the opposition party is calling fowl (justifiably in my opinion). Yesterday the military fired into the crowd killing up to 7 people so far. These people are standing up for democratic ideals in a country where I'm pretty sure their system isn't even set up in a democratic way. I'll have to ask Caley, but to my understanding, even if the vote is one way, the Supreme Leader of their council of 12 religious leaders has the ultimate say anyway. I'm not saying that the people should give up fighting for rights and freedoms they probably won't have, at least in the short term, I'm just saying the concept is so foreign to a middle class white girl from CO, USA. I guess the freedoms we've come to expect here in the US haven't really ever been threatened in a serious way; but if I can be convinced to move to France just because of our lack of a good health care system here, then I sure as hell probably wouldn't stay if our entire political system failed.
Hopefully I will never face a situation that calls for me to put my life on the line for something so abstract as "country" or "values" until then, I'm not going to worry about it any more :)
-Megan
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