New Phone!

This is a test post that I'm writing on my phone.

I received a free phone at work for being awesome, and one of the things it has (which my old, touch screen only phone didn't) is a full physical keyboard. I'm so used to the touchscreen by now that I use it still for browsing the web and texting, but I thought having a full keyboard would make blog-length typing a bit easier. So, I downloaded a blogging application, and here I go!

Testing, one, two? Test, test?

Critical Thinking: A selection from an essay I wrote for my Russian History class.

It’s a question that I’ve tried to discuss with my friends a number of times: What would you do if your country was invaded?

The question is purely academic. As an American living in the twenty-first century, I’ve never had the opportunity (and never will, God willing) to answer that question based on experience. Neither have many Americans; the entire twentieth century was an exercise in empire building and intervention where we have been the invading force, but never once were we forced to expel invaders from our own country. As I ask my friends, time and time again, What would happen if a foreign country invaded and threatened not only our livelihood, but our lives? Our family’s lives, our neighbor’s lives?

It’s a popular question, when taken in a Hollywood context. Chuck Norris in, ‘Invasion,’ and Patrick Swayze in, ‘Red Dawn,’ show us what it means to be an American fighting back against invaders, and show that it’s a common enough question to be a reliable box-office smash. Outside of Hollywood, however, the question is difficult to answer: What if a war was brought to our shores and inaction meant death?

The answers--sitting around a table at a restaurant, or lounging on a sofa in my living room, or standing around a parking lot after a movie—are predictable. ‘I’d fight back, no question.’ ‘I’d take my family and go into hiding.’ ‘I’d grab my Dad’s shotgun and my Uncle’s truck and have a blast!’

I may as well be asking what they would do in case of a zombie apocalypse.

The humor and bombast are only to be expected given the context of the question. It can only be hypothetical; no nation exists (again, God willing) that would challenge the U.S. with a full invasion.

But let’s change our position. Let’s say we’re a small European nation. Not a century ago, not a lifetime ago, but barely a generation past. Sixty years ago. We’ve been through some rough patches over the last twenty years, with a change in government, a Civil War, and we haven’t been sure of the name of our country for the last few decades, but at least we have our home, our land, and our family.

Then the Germans invade.

At first, we take it in stride: This is nothing new to us. After all, we’ve been Russians, then Ukrainians, then Russian again on and off for the last thirty years, so now that we are Germans, maybe Stalin will stay off our backs for a little while. Russian, German, or Ukrainian, just let us keep our land and we’ll salute whatever you ask us to.

Then we realize that this is not like the other times. This is not an invading force that wishes us to be its new tax-paying subjects; the Germans want our land, and they want us gone. We hear rumors of the last village they went through, stealing from and destroying their homes, raping and killing the villagers all to give them their Lebensraum, their living room. Their living room, (such a presumptive, disgusting phrase) which is filled with Ukrainians and Russians, Slavs and Romani, and which they have no intention of sharing. According to the survivors from the last village, they kill those that resist and they kill those that surrender.

The context has changed and the stakes have climbed. Now, the question: What would you do?