Reflection #8 The exaggeration of terrorism

Every day we watch the news on the TV just to keep track of all the things that have been happening. If we start to analyze all the news most of them are bad things that are happening around the world. Every time the news knows about some incident that is not very likely to happen they want to make every one to know about it and give it a lot of importance. And forget about her events that are more probable to happen since no one cares about them. Eventually people start to think that these events are more likely to happen than then really are.

Also government has all this organizations to protect the population from being attacked by bombs, terrorism, and anthrax attacks when the probability for any of these things happens are very low. There’s a chance for all this things to happen but the media presents to the public in a way that makes us think different, they exaggerate the events for their own good, to make it more interesting to us. This makes people more scared to terrorism or other attacks like this than they should be and less scared of other threats that are more probable to happen to them like a car accident, assault or robbery.

Simple crime and accidents can happen everywhere anytime but terrorism is more likely to happen in some specific places, mostly very important places, government buildings or attacking powerful people; but still people have created a huge fear to all this kinds of attacks. The reason is because people are mostly afraid of incidents that they don’t feel they control their fate. Like when you are on a plane, many people are scared of being on an airplane because they aren’t driving it, they don’t feel like they have control and they start to freak out. People are more scared of be on a plane than they are scared of driving a car, what they don’t know is that there are more probabilities of being killed in a car than in an airplane crash.

Reflection #7 Blood Diamonds

Sometimes people buy many articles just for fun; most people don’t even think or reflect about who made it or where did it come from. For example, have you eve thought about where did all those beautiful expensive diamonds you buy in the jewelry where mined?

This diamonds come from a very remote place in Africa called Sierra Lone. This place is the battle field for a war. An organization called the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) takes people as slaves and makes them mine diamonds for trading them to other countries for arms or money to sustain the needs of this war. If this people working in this mines are caught or are suspected of theft are most likely killed or dismembered but sometimes they even did it just for fun. This organization constantly committed these crimes to maintain a certain fear in the community so none of them will stand against them so they will have complete domination of the whole diamond field. These people injured in battle by the RUF even if the wound is not lethal it many times gets infect and may get many diseases because of the lack of medical treatment in Sierra Lone, so this often lead to the death of the person.

This situation began in the early 90’s and it’s still tormenting these people and they can’t do anything about. There have been non-political organizations in the United States where they try to help but it was very little what they where able to do because they need political power if they want to do anything about the problems occurring in Africa. They got to put a law in place that made the exportation of diamonds harder for the RUF since every single diamond need to have a document that indicated the precedence of it and where it was found; but this did very little help to it since this type of document was easily faked by the traders.

So the next time you think about buying diamonds think about this situation, you may be founding this war where thousands of people are being killed.