Today's gray skies and rain didn't help my homesickness for London. It was the first cold day and I pride myself on bearing the cold because I loved walking the streets of London in the freezing cold.
Then, to make it worse, I had a call with a lady in London. She happened to mention that there are only 4 people on her team and they have lots of work to do. LET ME GO HELP! Then my coworkers and I launched into London stories. Maybe its just the fact that I get to see my London Ladies (the girls I spent my semester abroad with) on FRIDAY! I cannot wait!
I never thought the day would come that I would read an old textbook for fun. Let me first say that I have started reading the news more (I read guardian.co.uk and thetimes.co.uk because I don't trust the American media haha. I like to see what other countries think about America, and I think the UK does a better job of reporting on the rest of the world).
ANYWAY, reading the news has really sparked my interest in history, because, as we all know, they're interrelated. One of my favorite classes in college (and probably my favorite Political Science class) was International Relations. In this class we had some insanely short amount of time to read The World Since 1945: A History of International Relations. That's a LOT of history to cram into 600 pages of text.
It has always amazed me how much history can actually be squeezed into a single sentence. Take this sentence for example (from the chapter on the Decolonization of Africa), "Three years later the colony, now renamed Ghana, was made self-governing under Nkrumah's leadership, and in March 1957, Nkrumah, now prime minister, was able to announce that Ghana had won its full independence." There is a lot going on there, and a lot had to happen for everything in that sentence to come about. Maybe that's just one of those weird things I think about that leaves everyone thinking, "....O-kay Hayley...that's just great."I never really finished reading this book. I was drowning in other homework and usually skimmed through the reading (about 100 pages per class if I recall correctly). I remember I completely skipped half the history of Latin America and a good bit of China/Taiwan. This time I'm determined to go through the ENTIRE book no matter how boring it may seem to get because it is ALL relevant today and I think it is important to know!
Here's something to think about:
The book opens with the end of WWII and it raises the question of whether or not the US dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary, justifiable, or even ethical.
"OF COURSE NOT," would be my initial reaction. All those innocent lives...and Japan was struggling to stay afloat in the war despite their stubborn refusal to surrender. I read John Hershey's Hiroshima in high school and it is so sad. In all honesty, atomic weapons (or WMDs in general) are way too over the top and that was an unfair situation Truman walked into and was ill-advised on- but alas, history is history.
The World Since 1945 suggests that if the US hadn't dropped the atomic bomb, the war would've carried on much longer and many lives on both sides would've been lost. That made me think: my grandfather, a medic in the Navy, was stationed in the Pacific from 1943-1946. He hardly ever talks about the war, but he did tell me one time that there were Japanese subs and all around his ship and the crew never knew it. I wonder, if the US didn't drop the atom bomb, would fighting have continued? Would more soldiers really have died? Would my grandfather have survived WWII? Would I be here?
Is it okay to support the US dropping the atom bomb for selfish reasons? At the same time, there is a Japanese 22-year old girl who isn't writing this blog because her grandfather did die in WWII.
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