Looking Around

After taking a long hiatus from non-required reading, I picked up a book last month about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It was fascinating to read a first hand account from the perspective of a young girl who lived through it, and I found myself gaining more interest in Asian history. It also helps to have family members living in China and to be planning a trip there myself. Mark, I can't wait to finally see you! How strange that our first meeting in 9 months will be on another continent.

After devouring Red Scarf Girl in less than I week, I started into a book about the Vietnam war that begins by describing the history and culture of the country and the events that triggered the long and bloody war. It's called America and Vietnam: The Elephant and the Tiger, by Albert Marrin, and so far it's a painful and captivating read. My experience seems to be corroborating the idea that history becomes more interesting with age. In the past it all seemed very far away and irrelevant, but I'm coming to understand that history is full of real people with complex motives that lead to tangled stories with fascinating and unexpected turns. I guess since most people don't really seem to understand what happened in Vietnam (or why it happened), it also feels like someone is letting me in on a secret. And who doesn't love a secret.

Also about a month ago I decided that I wanted to be more informed about national and world events. In an attempt to discourage my personality from getting in the way, I set a goal of reading one article per day. It seemed like a very reasonable goal, and now it allows me to feel like an overachiever if I manage to read more than one. Sadly enough, the primary result of this venture is that I now have a more complete mental list of the places in the world where people are killing each other. Oh, and I know who the president of Zimbabwe...was...is...might be?

For as long as I can remember I have been drawn to stories about WWII, particularly from the perspective of people who had to choose between doing what was safe and doing what was right. However most of my focus has been on the German/European side of the world, with only a cursory knowledge of the war in the Pacific. Recently I watched some movies with Mike about WWII (Das Boot and Letters from Iwo Jima) that depicted the lives of ordinary men who became soldiers and lost their lives in defense of their country, on opposite sides of the globe. These pictures of real war conditions reveal a startling tendency to view people as numbers, especially by leaders making the most important decisions for the fate of their soldiers. Do they think twice and find no other options? In some cases the leaders of countries and armies seem to view the situation with the idea that thousands will inevitably die and the most important thing is to protect the cause or resist the invader. Never mind the fact that each soldier has a family that will be scarred forever when he doesn't come home. From watching these films I'm also amazed and stunned by the horrific physical pain that human beings are capable of inflicting on each other. It's weird how people can so completely lose sight of the humanity and individual significance of others when blinded by a cause that seems more important. And probably some causes are more important, but are they really so prevalent as world history would lead us to believe?