The other day, during tennis practice, a conversation came up that created an interesting question

Some of the kids on my tennis team, can get...errr..a little wild sometime, somewhat immature. As captain, I try to control this. One situation involved a freshman, and a foreign exchange student. I think they were goofing around, and then they took it a little to far, and it got a little out of control (ball tossing to very hard ball tossing). So I stepped in told the guys to cut it out, told them to be peaceful.

After I told them to keep the peace, the foreign exchange student from Brazil asked me "Oh thats what you want to do, maintain peace? Look what your country is doing?" For some reason, he related my actions of trying to keep a high school tennis practice friendly, to the United States actions world wide. I'm not quite sure what he was trying to achieve? Guilt me for trying to keep things peaceful? Or call me a hypocrite because my country doesn't maintain peace world wide?

So I told him, just because I live in certain country doesn't necessarily mean I agree with the country's actions. And even if I did support things, how can you hold an individual who can't even vote responsible. Even though a country's actions may represent the majority of the country ( even though the majority here doesn't vote), you can just assume the country's action represents every single citizens will, and hold every individual of the country responsible for the country's actions, I believe that is not right.

I see this as a stereotype for other country's as well, from people in the US and every where. Just because there is a certain action of a country you don't like, doesn't mean you can dislike every individual of that nation for that action. It is very important to overcome this stereotype through out the world, some very close minded thinking, a very poor choice.

I'm not familiar with a diverse amount of political thoughts of people from other nations, but in the US I know many people with different points of view, and it certainly is not fair to ignore, dislike or ridicule someone for their country's actions that they don't agree with.

And even If I did agree with the US's actions, saying that I can't keep peace at a tennis practice because of the fact I agree with them, is pretty uncalled for, haha.

What do you think about it?

Peace- Trevor

"In his testimony before the 9/11 commission today, CIA Director George Tenet said it would take another five years to have the kind of intelligence service our country needs. Yea-thanks for letting EVERYBODY know that. GOOD JOB!"


- Conan O'Brien

Is your public High School in desperate need of money? Have you tried all types of fund raisers?

Have you thought about growing tobacco and selling it? Well if you haven't yet, you might just want to consider it.

39 Public Schools in Kentucky grow tobacco and profit off the tobacco grown. Not only that, in some of these schools (could be all) students are involved in the harvest. What an excellent message to be sending out to kids these days, growing the fabulous plant that kills more people than any other plant in the world.

Coincidentally, Kentucky has the highest rates of youth smoking in the United States. One school official from one of these schools said, "We do anything and everything we can do to try to keep the kids from smoking." The administrator also claims that growing tobacco doesn't necessarily encourage teens to smoke. So they preach to grow tobacco and not smoke it? That's just what we need these days, more suppliers of tobacco, and an economy more dependant on it. And not only are they encouraging kids to grow tobacco(as well as sending positive messages of tobacco, smoking) , the school is profiting off it, making money off peoples deadly habit, making money off peoples lives.

referring to one school:
"The school's tobacco quota is 2,400 pounds. If the entire quota is produced and sold, it would yield about $4,700 based on last burley season's average price"



I was astonished when I saw this article today. What do you think about it?

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/05/11/loc_loc2tob.html

Peace- Trevor