One of my friends replied to my previous diary entry on his website. However, his reply to my entry compelled me to write a reply of my own.

When I wrote how it was hard to me to take a stand on the war, it wasn't because I can't comprehend the difference between meddling and brutalizing. I'm not thinking about Saddam Hussein when I think about the war. I'm thinking about the thousands of innocent people, mostly children, that are the victims of war. To me, the mentality of war is "for the greater good", the lives lost will mean years and possibly decades of peace for those of us living. Which is great for us, but a bum hand for those that were "sacrificed" in the process of peace. The war didn't start after Bush's 48 hour deadline was up. The war, to me, started when the United States put that sanction up against Iraq. Sure the money the country gained would have gone straight to Hussein, but the number of lives lost to diseases that our bodies are naturally immune to now would have been much less had the sanction not been imposed. I don't have a difficult time differentiating between 'good' and 'evil'. I have a hard time seeing the justification of war.

Peace cannot be obtained through war. You will never be able to convince me otherwise. Yes there are moments of peace, but true peace will not and cannot be obtained through war. Peace isn't obtained by pointing a gun at someone and saying "give up or die". And that is essentially what is being done in war.

Just because I have lived in other countries doesn't mean that someone who hasn't had the same experiences as me can't feel the same thing that I do. Yeah, I was lucky enough to live in the society that I do, now. But I used to live in a terrorized country, I remember the riots, and hearing gun shots at night even though we lived in a gated and guarded community with the other army and embassy brats. Every day people had their civil liberties taken away from them and had their entire lives and bodies beaten down into a pulp for simply having the courage to speak their minds. It's easy to turn a blind eye to the humanitarian side of war, I did it for years because my parents didn't want us to witness the things that they did. It wasn't until I was much older that the ramifications of what little I hadseen hit me. That's actually the problem with living in Canada, or any country outside of the war-torn ones. We are detached from the war. It's easy for us to turn the war off, it's on our tv's, not in our backyards. No one is protesting to keep Saddam in power, not that I have seen at least. People are protesting against people dying in the name of peace. We never went to war for Tibet, and we never went to war on this scale for East Timor.

Frankly, and this topic I actually get rather snarky about, I don't need to be told how devious and sneaky the media is, and you should actually know that about me by now. The style of linguistics I study, and the way in which some of my profs have 'molded' me have allowed me to think critically when it comes to Media agencies. I resent being talked down to like I don't know how the media takes stories and puts their own spin on them. That resentment is actually part of a greater one, in which you've done that to me quite a few times, not just on this topic, and it really is rather annoying to be talked at like I'm a schoolchild. Not even my profs talk like that to me.

On a related note, it's not easy for us to focus our attention on one tragedy over another because of what is being pumped into our homes and society. The Media determines what we are to focus our attention on, because they'll only cover the stories that they want to lead with. I bet if Media was taken out of our society completely, or maybe even globally, yes you'd see a lot less of what was going on in the world, but you would probably have a lot more individuality, and tolerance for other people and societies because you're not being conditioned into thinking that one culture/religion/government is better over another. Society is being exploited by the Media, and we have been allowing ourselves to be exploited, and not only are we exploiting ourselves, we're pulling the rest of the world in after us.

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then / after