Friday, September 11, 2009

Week 3 Foundation #2 Comprehensive Peace

This reading talks about war and genocide, militarization, unilateralism, and Culture of violence. War and genocide talks a lot about the wars and how many have died because of them. Militarization talks about how much countries put into their militaries. Unilateralism talks mostly about the US bullying other nations. Culture of violence talks about violence coming into the household and how we hae grown accustom to it.

One thing that surprised me in the reading was how much we, the US, spend on out military. Page 22 states that the Bush Administration requested $441.6 billion for the military in 2006. There is also a graph that shows we spent $522 billion in 2005. This shocked me only because there is no other country that is spending anything relatively close to those numbers. China had only spent $63 billion in 2005.

The only problem I can see directly around campus is the violence issue. There is a huge risk for violence on a college campus because you have freshmen trying to prove themselves or an upper classmen trying to show that they are stronger. Most of the acts of violence on campus I’m sure are not reported due to fear.

One of the ways the book talks about fixing some of these issues with militarization is by signing a lot of the treaties that the US has not signed. This might help but there is always going to be the government that wants to be the best. That’s hard for us in the US to see it being anybody else besides ourselves. The US may just be the biggest superpower in the world right now, but is that only because we’re spending so much money on it. I’m not sure I have an exact way on how to fix this problem. Around campus we could fix some of the issues with violence by promoting conflict resolution. There are many different ways of dealing with an issue instead of violence. We could have seminars or mandatory classes for those who are caught being violent.

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