Tag Archives: Essay

Where are we Essay

Posted on by Standard Respond

WHERE ARE WE

By: Liam Odynsky

When you look think of space, what do you think of? Do you think of alien life? Strange planets? Maybe you think of beautiful stars or galaxies? The universe is infinite, so any of these are possible.

Look at our beautiful universe, our many galaxies and planets. I say that it our universe for one reason, and one reason alone. We live here, and the country you live in you consider “your” country too, do you not? We see it as ours, even though we are only one infinitesimal planet in a vast and infinite galaxy. But there is one thing that sets earth apart from the rest of the planets.

We are home to advanced life-forms, and all sorts of them, there are us, the humans, fish, birds, and many, many more. We are spectacular and unique in that way, the way us and the other beings of earth have not only been shaped by our planet, but also shaped it back in return. Look around, there are not many places untouched by us, we have clear-cut forests, chopped the tops off mountains, dug tunnels deep into the earth. We have even long postponed another ice age with our pollution.

Now I ask you to look back out to space again, does it not make all we’ve done feel insignificant? Look at how far it goes on for, it goes on literally forever. Practically none of that has been touched by mankind. Look at the stars at night, each of those hundreds of times bigger that our sun, most with more planets orbiting it than our sun. Look at how many of those there are, more than we could count in a hundred human lifetimes, a thousand even. Do we seem so powerful now, now that you realize that all of humanity and our planet is as small in comparison to the universe as a single germ dying is to a blue whale? Now that you know all of everything we’ve ever known could be destroyed in one second by a single asteroid?

With the universe being this vast and unpredictable, and human kind advancing as it is, how long until we try to make ourselves significant in this universe?

European first landing in North America affect on Aboriginals

Posted on by Standard Respond

The moment the Europeans stepped foot onto North America, the lives of every aboriginal man and woman was changed forever.

Whether that was for the better or for the worse is debated, but we know for sure that it wasn’t the same. Not long after the first Europeans, Christopher Columbus and crew landed in the New World, they began trading with the natives, or as they called them “savages”.  Christopher Columbus discovered this new world when he was hired to make a new trade route to India, and unknowingly landed on a small island off the coast of a massive continent that was completely missing from their maps. Columbus, not the sharpest sword in the armory, was convinced he had ended up in India, believing the natives of the New World to be the people not of North America, but of India.

So, of course, Columbus began to trade with them, he gave them things that the likes of which the Aboriginals had never seen before, such as Forks, Knifes, and pretty much everything metal, guns Bullets, and all sorts of weaponry. And in return the Aboriginals gave Columbus furs, legend has it that the Aboriginals traded not everything but the clothes on their backs, but literally EVERYTHING they had brought with them, leaving them naked and running back to their village to get more things to trade.

So I guess you could say that from that the Europeans changed the lives of the Aboriginals for the better, but what happened not long after may change your opinion. When Columbus left the small island and thought it be a good idea to bring some “savages” home with him. They didn’t last the trip, if disease didn’t kill them then the poor treatment given to them by the sailors did. And the ones left on the island didn’t fair too well either. Columbus and his men had unwittingly brought across diseases the likes of which the natives had never even heard of, hence weren’t even slightly able to resist them. Maladies like small pocks quickly wiped out every last native living on that little island. Columbus himself eventually died as well, never learning that this new world was not in fact India.

Not too long after more Europeans showed up, now realising this new world was actually a new world. They sent people to colonize and fish and trade, slowly over centuries taking over North America. Wars broke out back in Europe between different countries, causing the colonies to fight too; forming some of the bloodiest wars ever fought on American Soil, one of these battles was the civil war itself. The Aboriginals were constantly forced to pick sides, only to be betrayed and left for dead by the colonists that swore to protect them.

You always hear about famous North American wars, and the natives are always there in the background, always getting the short end of the stick, with the English trying to make them “civilized” and the French trying to kill them, nothing ever went the way they really wanted it too. After many years the Europeans made residential schools, where they’d take aboriginal children away from their families and try to force them to be “civilized”. The survival rate of these schools was very low.

In the end I believe that the Europeans changed the lives of the Aboriginals for the worse, in many more ways than one.