Rhetoric

I am so tired of politics. Sometimes I even get physically ill listening to people argue endlessly. So I'm going to try to avoid politics in this entry.

Obviously, one way a person's mind is changed is by hearing an opposing view that makes sense. For me, logic plays a huge part in my being convinced to alter my opinions. Some people, though, don't understand logic. This is frustrating for someone like me who uses that as the basis of most arguments. It's like going from A to B and then to C, fluidly. Some people just make huge leaps that don't make sense, are illogical.

As far as changing my own mind, it really started to happen post-college, that is, the two-year private school I attended. I unintentionally took three years off after those two years and I learned a heck of a lot more about life in general than I ever learned in college. It should be noted that this aforementioned two-year private school was religiously oriented, though there were definitely students who didn't adhere to the religion. The religion is a denomination of Christianity, but I have trouble even calling it that because I feel like it's considerably different from all the Christians I know and all the Christianity crap in the media. Anyhow, in this school, we were required to take two religion courses. One that I took was called Peace and Justice. In this class, I remember talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict. The class was shown a video of all the horrors suffered by the Palestinian people by the hand of Israel.

For awhile thereafter, I believed that Palestine was the victim of a terrible atrocity. It wasn't until I met my Jewish boyfriend that I started to question what I had been shown. The media makes Israel out to be the bad guy so often. But if you actually read the same news about a particular conflict from other countries, you get an entirely different take. That bomb that Israel launched at Palestine? Yeah, that was because for months on end, Palestine had been incessantly launching small-scale bombs into Israel, with no retaliation from Israel whatsoever. The bombs the Palestinians launch just so happen to hit Israeli schools, churches, and hospitals, whereas Israel's bombs hit military-related places in Palestine. It peeves me when the media twists things to create a certain reaction. Now, I feel played because of the media and even people within my own religion. Those people had good intentions though, so that is more easily forgivable. However, I'm not so sure about the intentions of the US media. I don't trust them one lick, especially since I discovered the monopoly of General Electric. I thought General Electric made appliances!!! Haha, yeah right. I feel like those appliances are just a cover for their dirty work.

Point is, I changed my mind on the Israel-Palestine thing. And now, because I have been duped, I am biased against Palestine and very skeptical of anything I hear about the situation.