Blog Post: The Trail of Tears by Charles River Editors.

Hello once again people who read this blog! So lately I've been reading a, ah, interesting book.. That book would be The Trail of Tears. If you don't know, this book is about the persecution of five different Indian tribes, but we're gonna focus on the Cherokee. So, on with the post!

One word to describe this book: Sad. That's actually a great word to describe it. I don't really have much to say about this book, mostly because it disgusts me, but I will say this.
As I hope most of you agree with, what we did to the Native Americans was little more then wrong and disgusting. We were limited to taking their land before the American Revolution, but when the Revolution ended and the war was won we went on a complete rampage over America, destroying, killing, and "moving" and Native American settlements in our path. The moving part would be okay, if half of the Natives hadn't died in the process. Why did they die? Because the soldiers escorting them didn't care at all about their safety. They completely ignored their symptoms of sickness, injury, and depression. It was horrible. These people called themselves Americans, yet they freely did this to people who already lived there because they didn't want to give up their ancestors land. It just disgusts me.

Like I said before, I really don't have much to say about this book. It disappoints me to see how our ancestors acted about such a thing, but then again. They did own slaves. Don't even get me started on that.
Well, that's basically my book report on The Trail of Tears. If you haven't read it, don't read it. It's plain out sad.
I'll see you all in the next blog post.
The End

"I have a dream"; in honor of Martin Luther King. Jr; How and why we should stop international bullying.

Hello once again people who read this blog. As all (or most, or maybe some) of you know, I submitted an outline a few weeks ago about one thing I want to happen in the world. That would be to stop international bullying. Well this is the actual post now so, on with the post.

I'm going to open up real quick with four little words: I. Hate. Public school.
I know it serves a purpose and not everyone can/will homeschool, but the outrageous amounts of bullying at schools is just disgusting and sad. Before I get too far into this, let me tell you a story. Right here in my own town of (Address blurred) there has been a recent terrible bullying case. I literally read about it this morning in the newspaper, kinda hard to miss it sense it made the front page. A mom had gone to my local Elementary school and complained about her daughter being bullied severely. Interested, I read on a little. The victim, a 5th grader, had been bullied by a student harshly. I didn't read anything about physical abuse, but it said the verbal abuse was severe. She couldn't be in the same room as the bully without getting insane anxiety issues, she had to be put on medication to even go into the school, and her grades had dropped from A's to F's because all she can think about is the bully. How terrible is that? To make matters worse, the bully is a teachers child. So either the teacher doesn't know, or is just as big of a jerk and doesn't care. I think we all know what can happen to children, or anyone, when treated this badly. It's a terrible thought isn't it? Now zoom out of my little town of 2000 people on your Google Earth and look at the rest of the country. This is happening in every city, every county, every town, everyWHERE. Then move out of the country and see the world. It's happening all over the entire world. And our efforts to stop it are somewhat pathetic. To the mom who's the mother of the child I mentioned above, if you manage to find this while looking through the internet about bullying, I just want you to know that I and my family are thinking of you all. I hope things get better for your daughter, because I was a victim of bullying myself. However my torment was never that severe and disgusting. I hope things get better with all my heart.

In my outline I mentioned 3 ways to possibly stop, or reduce, bullying. However after my recent studies I see that often they don't mean diddly squat. I'm not saying they all do, but it would appear many schools don't care about the bullying going on within them. The kids might, I've seen situations with teens working together to stand up to bullying. But the teachers don't seem to care too much.... comforting, isn't it? However my original point still stands true. If you're feeling threatened by a bully, don't take their.....stuff. Get an adult. A parent, a teacher, the principal, heck if you're feeling bold and giggly you could write the President a letter. Or you could do what I do, aka the stupid thing in most situations, and simply knock the bully into next weeks math test. Because no one wants to wake up in the middle of a math test. Again, this is a stupid idea. Never throw the first punch otherwise you'll be blamed and the bully will get away with it. But if he/she attacks you first.. you get the idea. I personally don't think schools have enough security to watch for bullying. Have people monitoring specific security cams solely for bullying. If they see some aggressive activity, they can respond immediately. Or, have security walking the halls or standing guard to keep a close eye on everyone. Bullies rarely attack their targets in the open, and when being watched that becomes even more uncommon. Or have a database of reported bullies and keep a trained eye on them. The things we could do to help stop this, but don't, are endless.

In the process of making this post, I decided to watch a video on bullying on Facebook. I learned some things sad, some shocking, and some sadly not surprising. Bullying is the cause of 50% of all teenage deaths. That's sad, isn't it? What's even more sad is the bullies either don't care, or are caught and not given any charges. Nothing happened. Just a human life, right? This is a major problem. Every day AT LEAST one teenager dies from bullying related suicide. If we all put our heads together I believe we can stop this, and start a new generation of peace among teenagers. Well, probably not full peace. But at least reduce the death rate and toll. Come on guys. Together we can make a difference.

My name is DJ, and that is my dream
End.