Welcome...and initial guidelines...

This blog will be used in the spring of 2008 by 80+ students at Drexel University to investigate the effects of Iraq on culture and the reverse. Our goal will be to better understand why the US is in Iraq, and to question whether literature can help us on this journey.

Weekly plans and other materials will always be posted in Vista, not this blog. So go to Bb Vista to get the discussion prompts and other instructions.

I intend this blog to manage our discussions and track our collective investigation.

You should have received an email from me inviting you to become a contributor to this blog. The email was sent Monday afternoon to your official Drexel email address.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Impact of the War

The war in Iraq has not had much of an impact on myself and my family. I am not from a military family, and I do not have any friends or relatives who are serving or have served overseas. It should be mentioned that my family relatively recently immigrated to the United States so I don't even have parents or grandparents that served in Vietnam or WWII, as some people who already posted do. I am pretty much as distant from the war as is possible while living in America.

That being said, I do care about the war and I have been against it from the beginning. I do not usually watch the nightly news, so I get most of my news from websites online such as Reuters and MSN, since it is my home page. I also try to read newspapers like the Wall Street Journal for information that I might not get online. Of course, I watch television programs like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report like most people my age do, but I do not consider that I get my news from them. I think that one would be severely misinformed about the country and the world today if TV shows like those were their sole source of information. They are not real news programs; they are only meant for a laugh, and that is what I watch them for. I'm sure that most news programs and websites have a political bias, but I think that it is virtually unavoidable. It is extremely difficult to find true unbiased reporting, so I try to take everything that I read or hear with a grain of salt.

No comments: