Acceptable vs. Radical

One of the points that I really liked this week was the distinction between emotional attachment to a country and comparing the value of lives throughout different countries. I think that we all agreed that emotional attachment is acceptable, healthy, and expected for citizens of a country. This attachment comes about for many different reasons, mainly the fact that most of us were born and raised here and have physical and emotional connections to the people and places inside the borders of our country. There is nothing wrong with this behavior until we start valuing these connections that we have more than the connections that other country's citizens have. It would be incredibly ignorant of us to think that we are the only people capable of having attachments to our country, which is why it is no more acceptable to kill an Afghan than to kill an American. I think that the sports analogy we made in class did a great job of clarifying this point. Being a fan of a sports team is great. It gives you something to do on the weekends and gives you bragging rights when you get to class, but things get out of control once violence gets involved. The Vancouver Canucks hockey fans in Canada last year were clearly out of line in trashing their city as a result of losing the Stanley Cup Finals to the Bruins, just as any person would be just as wrong to kill an Afghan as to kill an American.