Will the past ever leave us alone?

William Faulkner, a great American writer of the first half of the 20th Century wrote:"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

I got to thinking about this quote as we're coming up to our unit on World War II and all of the awful things that happened during that war. The death toll is staggering. An estimated 62 million people were killed, 37 million civilians and 25 millions soldiers. There were crimes against humanity - the Holocaust visited upon Europe's Jews and other outsiders; 7 million Chinese civilians killed not only by the Japanese but also in a bloody civil war; and Allied soldiers brutally kept in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in Asia.

It has been over 60 years since this war ended, yet we still see reminders of this war in many places that we go.
1. The United Nations Security Council is based upon the winners of the war and hasn't changed to reflect the world as it is today;
2. Japan has little to no armed forces;
3. Germany still pays reparations to the survivors of the Holocaust;
4. A distrust between the Soviet Union and America during the war carried over into a 46 year Cold War which we will continue to pay for until many of us are old and gray;
5. The cloud of Japanese internment camps hangs over America as a gross violation of Japanese-Americans civil liberties;
6. And we all live under the specter of a nuclear blast because of the race for the atom bomb in the 1940s that America won in July 1945 when we detonated one successfully in Trinity, New Mexico. One of the biggest threats to world peace, if not the biggest threats, is the spread of nuclear weapons today. Just look at North Korea and Iran.

So, my questions for you, as we tackle World War 2, are:
1. What should our approach to the war be? Do we look at it just as another American war which expanded our military, economic and political power across the globe? Or was there a greater purpose involved in fighting the war?
2. When do we let go of the legacy of the past? When is enough enough? Or are there some things that should never ever be forgotten? Specifics would be great for this answer.

Article on Japan's apology for its WW2 legacy - http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2005-08/2005-08-15-voa6.cfm
Casualties stats - http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
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Opinions on Black Boy

What are your current opinions on Black Boy?
If you like it, why?
If you don't, what could be better about the book?
What would you change about it if you were the author?

Geoff G.

1st iPod, now iPhone. Next, iBomb?

Will Apple take over the world?

As the release of the new Apple iPhone comes up, it's been a joke that apple is going to take over the world with it's technology. So far, we've seen that technology has it's good sides, and it's bad. At the world's fair, they had all this technology that was supposed to be for the good. Then World War II shows up and we turn out with the atomic bomb.

In the last 20 years, we've created arcade games, to the Atari home system, laptops, gaming consols like the new PS3 and Nintendo Wii, TVs that use mirrors to make a better picture, and countless of other things inclucing actual intelligent robots (note: all of this shown at the Consumer Electronic Show at the begining of January this year).

So my question is: with all the new "good" technology coming out, dare we ask what new "evil", destructive technology can we build? Are we going to become so advanced one day that we build something no human can survive? Is increasing the technology we build really an overall good thing?

-Abbie

What will the future be like?

When watching the movie yesterday on 1920s and 1930s art, I felt that much of it was about the future. In that time period people felt as though the future would be completely different from that time. Some felt that the expansion of city life was ruining the American way of life. Some felt that expansion was the only way our country was going to strive forward.

How do you think America will be in the future?

Will it have flying cars and robots or will it be the same?
What do you think would be good changes, and what do you think would be bad ones?

Robbie H.