Issues in STL

A bill is pending that will determine if STL City firefighters and police officers will be able to move out of the city. This has been an on-going problem within both departments for a while now. Many firefighters and policemen have continuously complained about the city's conditions and how they should be able to decide whether or not they want to stay in the city.

STL is also in danger of major floods because FEMA has failed to check the levees in the Metro East St. Louis area. This is not the first time FEMA has failed to secure cities from major water damage. The same thing occurred in Louisiana and that's why New Orleans had to go through the catastrophic results of Hurricane Katrina. This is a major issue because St. Louis's main weather threats come from floods.

Another issue facing STL is he amount of pregnant high school girls. It seems that the number of them is growing and why? Maybe abstinence in the sexual education classes are not enough. We should start by creating more effective curriculums in sexual education classes. A lot of girls believe that they already know about sex but then some find out the hard way that they don't. By educating them, maybe we can prevent it.

Prisoner of her Past: Accepting vs. Denying

"Prisoner of her Past"

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Human Rights research questions (proposal)

Was the government shortsighted in their attempt to secure New Orleans?
Why weren't the levees checked thoroughly?
why did it take so long for government to respond to Katrina?
how did the govn't react in other situations similar to the Katrina disaster?
unorganized refugee management? could it have been handled better or was it too much of a mess?
the public showed sympathy for New Orleans before the govn't did. Why is this?
Years later, how does the government really feel about their reaction to hurricane Katrina?



The sources that i will have to look up would be interviews or documentaries of people who were in office during the hurricane Katrina. I would like to see both sides: those who reacted right away and those who did not have a reaction at all. And I am sure there is someone who was not even aware of it. Furthermore, refugees who were witnesses of the poor management of the Katrina disaster (i.e the girls in "Prisoner of her Past") would provide an effective emotional appeal to my research.

Exam Research

So far, I am looking at human rights that are going on in the United States. More specifically, these human rights issues are focused on the treatment of the Black Community. One of the options that I have chosen to research is the failure of the US to help evacuees during Katrina. A documentary by Spike Lee ("If God is Willing, Da Creek won't Rise") sparked my interest in this particular topic. Also, a documentary called Black and Blue: Legend of the Hip hop Cop made me think of the police brutality going on in cities such as Chicago and New York. If i were to choose this topic, I would like to focus on evidence found from the documentary.

http://watching-tv.ew.com/2010/08/24/spike-lee-katrina-brad-pitt/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4846759

Current Events DRC

Judging from the recent articles concerning the DRC, it seems like the rape and genocide are still common amongst the people. A couple months ago, USA Today reported that 200 women were gang-raped near a Congo base. From reading the article, one can assume that this is probably something that, unfortunately, happens often. And it also seems like a lot of these atrocities are caused mostly by military rebels much like King Leopold's Congo. An article from lonelyplanet.com described that the "nation’s history reads like something out of Dante’s Inferno." The article also mentioned King Leopold II as being the beginning of this terrible trend in Africa's history.They described King Leopold's reign as a "brazen political folly." However, an article from guardian.co.uk just reported that the UN just announced that the Rwandan killings have been classified as genocide after a long battle with Kigali who wanted to clear these allegations.The war between the Tutsies and Hutus have been one of the major causes of the genocide in the past 14 years. So, aside from the mass genocide and rape that has been going on in the Congo it seems like the DRC has been making some sort of improvement. Furthermore, Women of the Congo, has became a very involved organization raising awareness of sexual violence to women in the Congo. Many celebrities such as, Sarah Wynter and Whoopi Goldberg, have attended their functions and have donated a lot of money to the organization.

Reflection: group discussion

Towards the end of our discussion, we touched on the whole idea of the chapter "Where there aren't no ten commandments". I made a comment responding to the discussion question we chose to answer: How did King Leopold manipulate the war in the Congo? And i said that he used their ignorance and lack of education to initiate the war in the Congo. Shabbi fed off of that saying that he also shipped children to special schools designed to breed soldiers for the Congo. Ideas like these are still lingering in Africa today. One of the questions that i have from the discussion is that this has been going on in Africa for over 100 years now and it seems like no one as been effective in fixing the problem. If Williams hadn't died would he have been the one to stop this? It seems that Williams was the only one that knew what he was doing but he had no support from other people.
As a group, i believe we developed a concise discussion that effectively raised ideas and synthesized the reading well. We could improve on being more focused in our discussions to avoid awkward silences. But some people had really good points and I could tell that everyone understood the reading very well.

Response to King Leopold

I thought it was interesting that Arabic countries were able to have African slaves. The Arab countries were of the poorer countries but Africans were still below them in a sense. It is a shame that Africans were stooped down to the lowest of the low that they could even be owned by people who were perceived to be lower class before African slaves began to be traded. Was it almost a trend or fad to have African slaves now? Who were considered "slaves" before the Africans?