Hist120

#12 Telling Your Story

When the terrorists attacked the Twin Towers on 9/11, I was sitting in the back row of my history class working on an assignment with several classmates. The teacher received a phone call, became very hushed and turned on the television.  The first plane had just hit  the towers.  Shortly after, the second plane hit the Pentagon and every channel began buzzing with questions.  Who hit the towers? Will there be any more?

     Our class ended and I walked two doors down to the cafeteria, just in time to see the second plane careen into the other tower on the lunch room screen.  The reporters then confirmed that it was indeed a terrorist attack, and that one more plane was still missing.  This plane then crash landed in a Pennsylvania field, killing all of the passengers but fortunately harming no others.  My thoughts the day of the 9/11 attacks were: who could possibly do something so inhumane and why would they ever do such a thing?   
    Before the attacks, I felt very safe and I never expected such an event to occur. There was no reason to believe that myself or anyone I knew was in danger of any kind.  My parents have several friends who work in the Pentagon, and so afterwards I worried very much for them.  Also, when the talk of weapons of mass destruction came into the media, I began to worry for myself, my family, and all of the other citizens living within close range of major US cities.  I feel somewhat safer now, simply because five years has passed, but at the same time, almost ten years passed between the first and second attacks on the World Trade Center.  This means that the terrorists could possibly be lying in wait, dormant until the public all but forgets the tragedy that happened in 2001.  The government was right about one thing, though. Everyone should continue on with their lives, because if we sit around worrying, our entire country will suffer.  If we continue about our business, then at least we can accomplish something instead of quaking in fear and wasting time.  If a nuclear weapon were to go off in Washington, almost every living thing would be dead within minutes- yes, it should be a concern, but worrying about it is pointless as we would all instantly disintegrate from the blast, or die within seconds from the ensuing radiation.
     9/11 was indeed a tragic event, and I feel terrible for those who lost family or friends on that day.  The past five years have gone by so quickly that I feel like it just happened this morning, and on that day I would never have thought that it would spark such a long, drawn out conflict overseas.  I sincerely hope that such an event never happens again, in any country, but that is probably wishful thinking- the question is not if, but when, where, and why.

#11 Wall Street

In the 1980’s the US economy was very prosperous for the wealthy, but the poverty level rose greatly, particularly for Hispanics and Blacks in the country. “The Reagan boom was an uneven one, despite continued economic expansion [1].” During this time, over 14.5 million jobs were created, but over 70 percent went to white males, and many were in middle to upper-class professions. In the movie Wall Street, this “rich get richer” philosophy runs rampant. In the movie Wall Street, character Gordon Gekko does well to explain the ideology behind the 1980’s economy with three simple words: “Greed is good.”

Wall Street depicts the “hustler’s ambition” showed by 1980’s stock brokers and investment bankers: lie and cheat your way into money, by any means possible. The main character Bud Fox began as a seemingly innocent man with a will for success. He is basically corrupted by Gekko and becomes the prank-monkey and eventually the miniature version of his mentor. Fox begins trading illegal inside information about stock companies with his greedy clients so they can make more money, and so begins to prosper himself. The ruthless Gekko buys the majority of the stock in a company called Teldar Paper and manipulates the stockholders into giving him a great deal of power over the company’s future.

At one point in the movie Gekko states to Fox, “It's all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.” This statement perfectly describes the mentality of the economy during the 1980’s. The effect of “Reaganomics” on the country seems very bittersweet; it helped many middle and upper class families gain wealth, as well as brought in a huge amount of tax revenue, but many of the poor and impoverished lost their jobs and were forced to work for minimum wage as blue collar jobs disappeared. In just two years from 1980 to 1982, “the percentage of Americans below the poverty level rose from 11.7 percent to 15 percent [2].” The movie Wall Street was made during the 1980’s to show the United States exactly what it was evolving into: a country where greed and lust for money reign over all other things.

[1] Nation of Nations pg. 950
[2] Nation of Nations pg. 951