Journal 1 "A People's History of the United States"

While reading the article I thought that the authors thesis was on the bottom of page 10 stating "...we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest between conquerors and conquered, masters and slave, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex." I interpret that as meaning we all have agendas for ourselves and dont neccesarily take into consideration who we hurt on our way to the top. Sometimes we are greedy and dont see the bigger picture, just what we want to. There are secrets and people have sufferend and been abused whether it be direct or indirectly for us, like family. To get or be where we are now, someone, somewhere, sometime sacraficed. The bigger question that the author brings to attention is on page 14 where he asks if all of the slavery and bloodshed is necessary for us to progress? Today, to get to the top in a company or industry it is no secret we usually have to fight someone for the position, for the big raise or both, sometimes it becomes more personal than professional, but is it always necessary? In summary this article tells of great explorers journeys, mainly Columbus, in which greed and fear of unaccomplishment breeds savage and distorted images leading to ignorant actions, in which other people became responsible for the failure of a leader. Parts of the article can be applied to today, for instance, the acts of Columbus being referred to as "genocide". We see that today, think of Iraq and even Darfur, where innocent people are being taken advantage of and killed, for us to have that pretty diamond necklace, which I am not saying diamonds are bad but should there be so much sacrafice in the making of that necklace (human lives) or other piece of jewlery? I am not really suprised at the contents of the reading and how terribly people known for being peaceful were treated, because we do things just like that now, and unfortunatly it had to start somewhere.