QQC #3

We all remember having to take those long, dull history classes- what is the point? Where will this knowledge ever truly affect our lives? I present to you here a concrete reason: we cannot prevent that which we do not know. Oft said is the phrase "history repeats itself," but is this true?

In Three Cups of Tea, the bombing of the World Trade Center sparked a terrible influx of hate-mail to Greg Mortenson because, in the majority of the public's eyes, he was aiding terrorism. "The terrorists were Muslim, so all Muslims are terrorists," their flawed logic concluded.

An elderly woman mailed Mortenson with a very different opinion. "I'm old enough to remember this nonsense from World War II," she wrote, referring to the downright racist hatred many Americans felt for the Middle East, "when we turned on all the Japanese..." Through a parallel she drew between World War II and the War on Terror, it is made apparent that history does indeed repeat itself, and that if people do not take the time to learn it, to realize the cause and effect of this long chain of dominoes calle Life, then we will suffer the repercussions.

My humanities teacher told me that she was on the bus and heard the ignorant solution of someone who was either clueless or truly racist. One man to his friend suggested that any and every Muslim be put into concentration camps as a solution to terrorism. As a student fresh out of a World War I and II unit, my immediate reaction was "Wouldn't that be just as bad as what Hitler did to the Jews?"

Her solemn response was "Exactly."