Last Semester of HS - Days 3

Hung out with Brenn before everyone showed up, and, well, Ms. Horner brought up when she passed by how its like 3 weeks until Labor day. It expanded in the following discussion to something along of the lines of doing labor for week.

My response: "Yep, we'll be in labor until December."

I wasn't too keen on todays kooky little group assignment in Sociology class -- a cumulative resume for the group -- but early on in the book - the first chapter, is a part I wish to quote, which is about the first Persian Gulf war:

From the beginning of the Persian Gulf crisis, attention and blame focused on one man, Iraq's President Saddam Hussein. U.S. President George Bush said that half a century ago, "our nation and the world paid dearly for appeasing an aggressor [Adolph Hitler] who should, and could have been stopped. We are not going to make the same mistake again" (quoted in Miller and Mylroie, 1990, p. xii). Secretary of State James Baker echoed this view: The crisis in the gulf was "about a dictator who, acting alone and unchallenged, could strangle the global economic order" (quoted in Miller and Mylroie, 1990, p. xiii). The media, too, focused on the individual. "What kind of man would cold-bloodedly gobble up a neighboring country?" Asked Time magazine (August 13, 1990, p. 23). "Saddam is a tyrant and a bully," declared Newsweek (August 13, 1990, p. 17). To many Americans, Saddam Hussein became the personification of evil, and the war in the Persian Gulf was "Saddam's war."

There is little doubt that Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait and bears personal responsibility for the bloodshed and destruction that dollowed. But can one man single-handedly creat an international crisis and alter the course of history? Sociologists think not. They argue that to understand events like the invasion of Kuwait we need to look beyond individuals to the social forces that shape human behavior. Even when certain people play critical roles in history, we need to understand the social factors that enable them to do so. Thus, the crisis in the gulf was not caused by a single villain acting alone, but was the result of preexisting tensions, cultural misunderstandings, political miscalculations, and a struggle for power in a region of strategic and economic importance. If Saddam Hussein were to disappear tomorrow, the problems in the Middle East would not suddenly disappear with him.
"Understanding Sociology" - page 3