introduction to beliefs

I was thinking about this while watching the news the other day. Take the Carl Rove case, and compare it to Watergate. See any similarities? My mother said that she thought the CIA leak went all the way back up to Cheney. She thinks it might even go back up to Bush, but I believe her wrong. Bush does not seem like the type to do something like that; he strikes me more as the stupid type, who would never even think to undermine his enemies in such a way. Cheney, however, is not as stupid, and Carl Rove is often known as the brain of the president.
All of this journalism about the leak, combined with the failed Supreme Court nomination, and the two Hurricanes, have seriously weaked Pres. Bush's pollings. If you look at them, you get somewhere around 36%. When Pres. Nixon resigned, his approval ratings were about at 28%. President Bush is getting there, and he's still in his first year of presidency.
People have another three years to choose the next president, but have you noticed the amount of campaining that's going on for this candidate or that candidate? President Bush is a lame duck already. My friend believes he's going to be impeached, but I think he's just going to be widely hated. Republicans have the majority in both the house and the senate (though they lost many people in last weeks elections), and they will stand besides Bush in most cases. Though they are ready to impeach Clinton for 'sleeping around', they are not ready to impeach a president who could be regarded as a war criminal, if he guarantees them power. 
The widest spread general - I wouldn't say hatred - disagreement with President Bush is in the black population of the United States. After Hurricane Katrina, Bush's approval ratings among the blacks had taken a nose dive to a mere 2%, with a 4% margin of error. This means that the actual approval rating could have been from 0 - 5%, a very bad number for a war president who relies on the black population for much of his armed forces. I have many friends who are African American, as does my mother, and though it might be an influence of living in Boston, land of the democrats, for so long, not a single one has one good thing to say about the president.
I have as many friends who are French, or from other countries in Europe. They make fun of the United States. If you go anywhere in Europe and tell them you're American, or even that you live in America, you're laughed at. Most often, they become more reserved, and you can barely get a word out of them that is not stiff and cold. I was in Brussels, Belgium, when President Bush visited there, and in the Metro, if you were seen speaking English without a British accent, you were glared at and given the evil eye until you got off the train. President Bush had insisted on barracades all around where he was staying, for a mile radius. One of my old taxi drivers was complaining that he'd not seen anything like this since the Germans had invaded Belgium. He declared to me (once I had explained that I lived in Boston, and was definitely not a supporter of Bush), that his poor mother, the hundred-year old European lady you see in movies, was going postal, and that every time she looked out their windows and saw the barricade, she would nearly faint.
Does the United States of America, land of the free and equal want to be compared to Germany during the Second World War?
They ridicule the United States as well for the extreme-right's obsession with religion. What happened to the seperation of Church and State? I don't know how many e-mails I received from my friends in France and Belgium after stickers were put inside the Science books stating that Evolution was nothing but a theory. Needless to say, none of them were complimentary. My mother raised a good point: If they're going to teach the bible in school, why not the Torah? The Koran, even? If everyone has a right to express their religion, why are Muslims placed on lists of possible terrorists, simply because they are Muslim?
I go to Boston Latin School, and my mother was appalled when we were made to read the bible in my first term of 7th grade. She had gone to the open house, and was going to ask the teacher why they couldn't read the Koran. She believed this would have raised contreversy, so she spared my feelings and ability to show my face to my Enrichment teacher, and remained silent. I am an atheist. Why should I be forced to learn about someone else's religion? Though we were reading the Old Testament, which is the same text as the Torah, it is still offensive to the many Jewish people in my class. My friend, Andy, whose friend practices Confucianism, raised a good point: What about the people who practice Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism? The chance that their religion will be represented is close to zero.
If religion is to be taught in schools, let all religions be taught.
Along the same lines, my mother got in an argument with the school commitee, because they said that no teachers should give homework on religious holidays. She asked: "Which holidays will you recognize?" This is a good point. Which religions will be recognized? No matter how small the population, every single person counts. A 'small' religion, such as Isoko (a religion based in an area of Nigeria), will it be represented? I'm sure there is someone in the United States who belongs to that religion. Will it be ignored, simply because not enough people believe in it? Would this be considered a breach of every human's right to be heard?

We may never know.

- Mathilde