Petitions for Secession

After Obama won the election earlier this month, many petitions have gone up onto the We the People website. Anyone can post a petition on the We the People website, and if a petition gets more than 25,000 signatures, it must be reviewed by the White House. All 50 states have a petition to secede, but the Texas petition has the most signatures. Currently there are 117,108 signatures on Texas's petition. While these petitions aren't from the states themselves, it is alarming that a petition to secede from the Untied States can get so many signatures. I think that many of the signatures may just be the initial reaction of people upset by the results of the election, but at the same time, many of the signatures are also from people seriously wanting to withdraw from the United States and create their own government.

There are also petitions in response to the secession petitions on the We the People website. One petitions says to, "Deport Everyone That Signed A Petition To Withdraw Their State From The United States Of America." If people really were deported for signing that petition, that would be a clear violation of the first amendment. Even so, that petition has 25,375 signatures.

Both the secession petitions and the one wanting to deport the people who signed them are both very extreme, so the number of signatures that both of those petitions received is an alarming wake up call of how upset people are with the current state of the government. The fact that even a small percentage of americans would be comfortable with splitting up the United States, or others would be willing to so blatantly ignore the first amendment, even if we are in perilous times, is unnerving.

Why do you think people signed either of these petitions? And how do you think the White House could best respond to these petitions?

Traumatized Veterans

Today being Veterans day, and reading Mr. Bolos's blog post this morning inspired me to think about how veterans are treated in America. On the NY Times website, I found an opinion piece called "When War Comes Home" about a decorated combat veteran, Staff Sgt. Dwight L. Smith Jr., who ended up murdering a 65 year old woman. The author, Nicholas Kristof, tries to explore whether soldiers' brain injuries and traumas from war could be blamed for crimes committed later. Staff Sgt. Dwight L. Smith Jr. was diagnosed with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) after being blown 15 feet in the air by a mortar shell.

Kristof brings up the question whether the army could have done a better job in screening Sargent Smith's mental health. I think they definitely could have. Asking questions of the soldiers is simply not enough. There needs to be a more intensive screening process of soldiers coming back for war, so that they can attempt to treat whatever problems may be present. Smith wrote a letter to his father in which he wrote, "I am going to be honest with you dad. I have killed a lot of men and children. Some that didn’t even do anything for me to kill them.... I think I got addicted to killing people." If Sargent Smith was able to admit to his father that he had this problem, a professional should have been able to at least see that Smith had some serious problems that needed to be dealt with before he was integrated back into society. He needed to be meeting with psychologists and doctors in order to cope with his PTSD.


Do you think the Army is partly responsible for what Sargent Smith did? How do you think America can better deal with Veterans with serious brain injuries and trauma?

American Atrocities

In class on Friday, we talked about how american soldiers are often viewed by other Americans as the "good" soldiers, who play by the rules and only fight for what is right. However, in reality, American Soldiers are responsible for many atrocities during war time. The Vietnam War group talked about the massacre of civilians in Vietnam by American Soldiers, but that was not the only Atrocity committed by American Soldiers. In 2005, a group of US marines killed twenty-four unarmed Iraqis, many of whom were women and children. Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich admitted to telling his men to "shoot first and ask questions later."

Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich

In this CBS News article, they reported that Wuterich and his men were all found not guilty in January 2012. Their manslaughter charges were all dropped. I thought it was very interesting that a man who admittedly murdered unarmed civilians was let go completely free. It seems to go against everything America stands for. Why should we hold a double standard? If we had found out that Iraqi soldiers had massacred 24 American civilians, there would be mass outrage. Do we value American lives over all others? Why do Americans have this idea that American Soldiers can do no wrong?