China

Down with the old and up with the new. This cliche is so true throughout history, it is pretty much the one sentence definition of the word revolution. This revolution used violence kind of like the one in Algiers. The Red-Guards targeted the wealthy because they were against Mao and while they said that they were targeting all socioeconomic demographics, it didn't seem that way to me. I think that by destroying all of the artifacts the Red Guards were just trying to kill any memories of the old China. This 'revolution' was more like a a war that was just trying to erase history.

Cold War

My mom moved to the states from Canada in the midst of the Cold War. She says that she remembers all of the bomb drills that she had when she got to the states and how stupid they were in hind sight because hiding under a desk is really gonna save you right? Well, she said that it was really nerve racking because unlike a fire drill she didn't know if she was actually taking in her last few breathes or not.

Oil-Mania

A wise man once said that possession is 2/5 of the law. As we can see the Middle East clearly possesses so much oil that it has put itself in a good spot to play a game called monopoly. The oil companies in the Middle East is able to make deals with all of the governments because they have the power and the control of the chip that everyone wants to get their hands on. If you ask me now that they have the oil, we should get our hands on all of the water we can so that when they need that then they will come to us. No, but for real, it is crucial that we can possess oil because the Middle-Eastern oil monopolizers will just drive the price up to show quarterly growth, especially as the supplies run thin.

Post Colonialism Pop-Culture

Movies: Blood Diamond, Jarhead, The Kingdom, 3 Kings, Rendition

Tv: House of Saddam, 24(a lot of Middle-East references in the current season)

Books: The Kite Runner

Kenya

With the life expectance of 51 in Kenya it is apparent that something has gone terribly wrong with the way things are done there. While much of the country is rural, thus making it harder for medical care to be brought in, a life expectancy rate of 51 is lower than most of the other countries in the world, some of which are even less developed than Kenya. With a population of over 31 million it would seem that it would not be overcrowded. the real kicker is that it has more access to WHO resources than the rest of the continent, so why is the life expectancy so low?

The Berlin Wall

How did the falling of the wall change the culture in Germany?

What were the mental effects and the cultural effects of the wall?

My monument is really interesting because over the course of its history as it changes so do the people of Berlin and it is really cool to look from 1961-???? and see how different events have been influenced by the wall like the reopening of a major intersection last month in Berlin that brings Western and Eastern Berlin closer together.

Cold War

As kids, the Cold War made no sense to my parents. My father even said, "I wondered why they called it the cold war." They were both unaware of the true magnitude of what was at stake, but their two shorts stories were quite different. My mother's is simple: the Cold War had no effect upon her. My dad on the other hand said it shook his childhood a bit. My father mentioned that the scariest incident he could remember during the Cold War was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Along with his parents, adults throughout his neighborhood were scared of what could happen, and began building bomb shelters. During school, my father and his classmates went through drills in which they would crawl under their desks, and curl up in balls. Of course this would do nothing against a nuclear attack, but this was the mentality that emerged out of the Cold War. The Russians were the "big bad guys" and were no ally of the Americans.