Saturday, April 30, 2005

Hope for the Future?

A student in my Theo 1120 course wrote the following about the blog project:
Seriously, I do understand the whole concept of this blogging and changing the world project. I do not know if you already knew this but this whole project sort of works in with self-esteem. But it only works if you really did do the project because every time you gave us a question it dealt with how we changed the world. It kind of gives us and opportunity to say that I think that this is wrong, this is what I did to change it, and it worked. But even if it didn’t work you still identified what you think is wrong with the world and one day you can come back and pick up where you left off so you can change the world. It is funny because today I was taking my history final and I answered a question about whether I thought the world was better off today or 600 years ago. I answered the leaders 600 years ago were better than we are today because they did something about their problems. For example, the Haitian Revolution ended because of the efforts of a man named Bawkman Duty and Toussaint L’ouvesture, Bawkman was a captured slave just like the rest of the people in Haiti, he realized the way he was being treated as not right so he did something about it. In 1740 he killed his master, went into the Haitian ghettos or maroons where slaves had fled and were living incognito. Duty then trained the maroons in guerilla warfare and used drums to unite all the different backgrounds. Because not all the slaves spoke the same language. On august 14, 1791 the revolution began and August 22, 200 square miles of Haiti was freed in one night. Duty was killed during and attack on a big port but his efforts still continued on. After he died, Toussaint L’ouvesture became the new leader and in 1793, the Haitian allied with the Spanish and drove France out of Haiti. Toussaint then broke with the Spanish drove out the Spanish, English and White creoles and rejoined with the French to become a free county. However, Napoleon Bonaparte reestablished slavery in the French empire in 1799, Napoleons armies attacked Toussaint’s and he surrendered. John Jack Desalines replaced Toussaint and lead the army to destroy the French. In 1804 Desaline’s declared independence from France.
What was the point of me telling that story? The point is that it takes more than one person to change the world but it takes one persons effort to start that change. I am the one person who will start the change and if I do a good job at it after I am gone, someone else will pick up where I left off and eventually my idea of an Aids free world will come true.

Her blog entries are listed here

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