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Semester in review

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Beside the financial aid fiasco, for most CSU-Pueblo students, this semester has been average. But beyond CSU-Pueblo, there have been many events with resounding implications for all of us.

During this semester we witnessed an election that failed to unite the country. Now, more than ever before we witnessed our differences used to divide us up into demographics, generalizations used to extort votes. Instead of having candidates who worked to unite our country in a new direction, we saw leadership fail to offer any new or definitive conclusions resulting in a status-quo election.

Contributing to the status-quo is the violence between Israel and Gaza. This situation was unique in that Hamas, the terrorist organization responsible for the militant movement in Gaza, essentially decided to hold Israel hostage. After breaking a cease-fire by firing rockets into Israel, Hamas then demanded that Israel lift trade restrictions on Gaza if they wanted the rocket attacks to stop.

Even more alarming than the violence is the ability of a group of people to fire rockets on a country, on innocent civilians and believe that their actions are just.

The stock market has proved just as volatile as the middle-east recently. Stocks have gone up and down on speculation. Fearing that the debt crisis in Europe will get worse or that congress will be unable to come to a resolution and avoid the fiscal cliff that threatens to send our economy back into a recession.

Another recent curiosity is super-storm Sandy that re-sparked the global warming debate. Ultimately, what is most curious about the storm is not whether or not it was caused by global warming, but how people can continue to make an issue of an event that has caused destruction and human suffering without first addressing the damage caused by the storm.

Meanwhile, people still enjoyed Thanksgiving, eating copious amounts of food and none of these occurrences prevented people from still clamoring in line to get the best deals on Black Friday.

Commentators and politicians alike site many of these occurrences as proof for their own agenda. Yet history shows that such occurrences are not unique to our time. These current events serve as a reminder of human nature, and the same battles that have plagued us throughout our history as the dominant species on this planet.

Nations will rise and fall, they will go to war, and economies will continue to exist in a state of flux. These things occur almost universally. Almost as predictable are the reactions that people will have to such events; and here lies the lesson to be learned. We cannot simply sit around and hope for different events to come our way in the future. We must change the way we react to these events, and how we hold ourselves and others accountable.

It can no longer be acceptable to for a militant group to hold a country hostage, the same way it can no longer be acceptable to use our differences or human suffering for political gain. As a species we must embrace human nature for what it is and our potential for both good and bad. But we must also work to overcome our baser instincts and raise the bar, for the good of all of us


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