There are enough open doors in life for everyone to have a successful and happy future. However, there are also many things in life that can abruptly close those doors right in your face, such as war. War can never be justified because not only is it unethical, but it completely destroys the spirit of humans. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize this at all, while some may only consider it from time to time. People are doubtful of the terrible effects of war because they often believe that war can be justified in some situations, if not all. Despite the idea that there are no solutions to conflict besides war, nonviolent resistance is a reasonable method that should be looked into because it can change our world for the better.

Fundamentally, the Just War Theory is one that speaks on how and why wars happen, and states that war is justified in select cases. There are three important parts of the Just War Theory—Jus Ad Bellum, Jus In Bello, and Jus Post Bellum. These parts apply to two enemies that have similarities in religion, race, or language. When values are shared between these two groups, they usually agree on the limits of war, and this is when Just War comes into play. However, when there are two groups that are not culturally similar or when there is a difference in rank, these rules do not appertain to the war. The reason why this theory exists is for enemies to be able to understand who will participate in the war, and what will happen regarding relations in the aftermath of it. Often times, when groups agree on certain conditions of the Just War Theory, it is because it will benefit them in the long run, and they are able to avoid political or moral issues that occurred in the past.

In the first section called “Jus Ad Bellum” of the Just War Theory, there are six criteria for war. In a document created by Michael Lacewing, which has all of the details about this idea, states, “The response of declaring war must be proportionate, i.e. the good that can be secured through war must outweigh the evil that will most likely occur. The end must justify the means. And in this calculation, the state must take into account not just the costs and benefits to itself, but those that will affect everyone involved in the war.” As it has been proved countless amounts of time, there is no secure answer of what might happen after the war is finished. There may be many consequences of war - another country may attack, things may be taken over, and a crucial decision may even be made, changing everything around. People who advocate for this theory and believe that it is correct, argue that the end of the war will make everything that happened during the war, much better. This is complete bogus because many countries are left on their own to pick up the pieces, and somehow scavenge for money to pay for all of the damage that another country has caused them. Ultimately, one group may get what they want, but is all of the destruction that war creates really necessary?

This is especially true for wars that go on for a long time - so long, that people completely forget what even started it, and what the goal of it is. The War on Terror is a perfect example of this as it is one that has been going on for sixteen years, ever since the September 11 attacks on the twin towers. In 2016, the United States dropped 26,171 bombs and most of these air attacks took place in Syria and Iraq. Other countries include Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. All of these countries were predominately Muslim countries, and so many innocent people were killed by the drone attacks. The US government were in a mindset that they would kill whoever they wanted, until they actually killed the right person. They overlooked the lives of so many people by grouping them as one, and hoped that the end of it would be “justified.” None of these losses were ever acknowledged by the United States, and neither did anyone think twice about providing war reparations to those people that were cruelly affected by it.

This leads into the second section of the Just War Theory called “Jus In Bellum.” This agreement speaks about how the enemy should be treated by the opposing side. There are also six different criteria for this section, one being, “No weapons or means of war that are ‘evil in themselves’ are permitted. Examples include ethnic cleansing and mass rape.” This idea of the theory, much like all of the other ideas, is completely delusional. The Just War Theory does not accept that weapons are already “evil in themselves,” although this is so obviously true. Weapons are meant to cause harm to other people, mentally and physically - as soon as the engineer begins crafting the instrument, it is only meant for destruction and evil. War has become so normalized and casual that using weapons to wreak havoc is not something that is seen as immoral. Although weapons are just one inhumane factor of war, another obscene aspect is wartime sexual violence. Rape has been committed by combatants for a very long time, and it is just something that is expected of war. During the Vietnam War, there was a plethora of assaults which were done by South Korean and American soldiers. A Vietnamese woman posted her story on a petition website, where she explained how a soldier came and raped both her and her mother in their shop. Their lives were changed forever, and they could do nothing but accept it. So many people’s lives wouldn’t have been affected as they were if the war never happened. This is another reason why Just War Theory would never work. Preventing rape from happening in a world where not everyone is fully aware of the consequences and effects of it is truly impossible to do. If women who were once raped are still struggling today to get recognition from the government of the things they experienced, than it is completely unreasonable to believe that citizens would ever stop committing these heartless crimes.

The last viewpoint of this theory is called “Jus Post Bellum,” which is the last aspect. This concludes the whole entire theory and speaks about the aftermath of the war, “The discrimination between combatants (including political leaders) and noncombatants still applies when seeking punishment. Public, international trials for war crimes should be conducted.” In connection to the previous paragraph, many different war crimes are completely unrecognized. There are international rules, in places like Syria, which protect citizens and prisoners of the war who aren’t participating in it. According to a CNN article, some of these war crimes include torture or inhuman treatment, purposely causing suffering, causing serious injury to body or health, and destruction of property. What’s completely mind-boggling is that these war crimes are an exact definition of what the war is. There haven’t been any prosecutions made against anyone in Syria, however there have been many allegations made. Nevertheless, no further investigation has been done to get justice for the victims. Jus Post Bellum does not come even close to answering for the monstrosity of war.

Through the whole entire process of war, so much damage is done that it can take a very long time to fix, and even then, they may never go back to how they once were. This makes the Just War Theory an illogical mindset which would never work in the world we live in today. None of the details listed in the theory could ever justify war. However, there is a clear solution. The concept of nonviolence should be implemented and always used, no matter the conflict. This type of resistance is used to achieve goals of social change by participating in protests, civil disobedience, and many other methods. Citizens can partake in this, which is what makes it so powerful and effective. People like Ghandi, Henry David Thoreau, and MLK all have partook in nonviolent resistance. If nonviolence was looked into by our world, it would completely change the mindset of war. War is a vicious cycle that will continue as long as people feed the fire. The more that people depend on violence as their number one priority, the more damaged this world will become.

Learning English when I first came to America was something I had to get used to fast and quickly. I can remember this memory vividly as if I am reliving it. It was the first day of Kindergarten, and the teacher, Ms. Dougherty, was giving a tour of the classroom. Ms. Dougherty was a middle aged woman with blonde curly hair, which she always had pinned up. She was showing everyone where everything was so they could use materials when needed. There was a sink at the side of the room, and she walked over to it, her heels made a sound every time they came into contact with the white tiled floors. She picked up a bottle of soap off the edge of it, and held it in the air, and started speaking in a language that I had no understanding of - English. Neither did I know at the time what that bottle with the orange label, and the green pump was. Obviously, she was describing to us to wash our hands after we used the bathroom, but the first thing that popped into my five-year-old head was that she was telling us that it was something edible and that we could eat it whenever we liked. I don’t know why I thought that, but for some reason, it made sense to me. I never got to test out that theory, but I am thankful I didn’t.

Other times that year, I would speak Banglish, which was Bangla and English mixed together. Because Bangla was the first language I learned, sometimes I would accidentally mix it in when I was speaking with people at school, and this continues to happen to me today but when I am speaking with my parents. When I speak this way, my parents are still able to understand me, but with people other than them, they do not know what I am talking about. Another day back in Kindergarten, I was in the lunch line, and I wanted to get a carton of milk with my food. I remembered that my mom kept bothering me about it, telling me that it would keep me healthy and strong so I should drink it every day, so I thought why not? Instead of saying “Can I have some milk?’’ I said, ‘’Can I have some doodh?” The lunch lady looked confused, and I didn’t know why, until I pointed at the milk behind the counter and she said, “Oh, milk!’’ I hadn’t realized that I mixed in my Bengali with my English; it was something out of habit.

One thing I can say that has never happened to me is facing discrimination for speaking Bangla. However, other people have gone through things like this. In How to Tame a Wild Tongue by Gloria Anzaldua, she spoke about a time when she tried to correct her teacher because she pronounced her name wrong. The teacher shot back, “If you want to be American, speak American. If you don’t like it, go back to Mexico where you belong.’’ (Anzaldua, 53) The teacher was not telling Gloria in a respectful manner, but instead was being ignorant towards her identity and where she was from. She is also putting this idea into Gloria’s head that in order to be American, you need to speak English, which isn’t true, especially since America is so diverse and people speak so many different languages. In Pedagogy of Education by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian writer, talked about when teachers provide the student certain information to ‘’learn’’ as if they were a computer instead of teaching them the material in a natural way. In his writing piece he wrote, “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store…’’ Connecting this to what happened to Gloria, the teacher planted in her head that because she was speaking Spanish, she was inferior to her and to those who were speaking English. This, however, truly shows how ignorant and narrow-minded the teacher was, and how sometimes, the people who believe that they are the best and have good knowledge about different things, really don’t in reality. In order for students to catch on to the material you are teaching, teachers should guide students, not form an idea of something and command the student to understand or believe in that idea. No one should be shaming anyone else for speaking a language that isn’t English, or for being from another country, and if the teacher needed her to speak it in that environment, she could have handled the situation differently instead of disrespecting her.

The reason for the banking concept is so there will be no risk of a student having their own ideas and mindset about the world and the things that they are learning in school. The opposite of this concept is teaching the natural way. In Freire’s writing he stated that, “The solution is not to 'integrate" them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become "beings for themselves." Becoming their own being means having individuality, however, the teachers prevent this from happening by teaching everyone in the class a certain thing, in a certain way, and nothing more than that. An example of free speech that has happened recently and got a lot of controversies was The Black Lives Matter movement, which spread awareness about the injustice towards black people. Police were killing innocent black people on the street and using excuses for their actions, which sometimes had no consequences. Some truly believed what these police were doing was right, and the black people were at fault. Others believed that this movement was “selfish” because it only had to do with black people.

In another text from the New York Times called Who Is Entitled to Be Heard by Suzanne Nossel it speaks about how people have been threatened, harassed, and put down for speaking their minds. A lot of this speech discrimination happened on college campuses, like Yale, where “campus events disrupted and activists threatened for speaking their minds.’’ (Nossel) Similarly, as seen in Gloria’s situation, this free speech her teacher had was used to discriminate against her, and to shut down her own speech completely. Free speech should make the community a stronger place by fortifying the ethic, especially in a classroom. However, since the teacher had the upper hand, and she was in charge of the classroom, she did what she believed was correct and passed on that idea to Gloria and the rest of the students.

While watching TV may have a lot of negative connotation, it played a big role in aiding me in learning English. I remember when I woke up every morning, I would turn on the TV and watch all of the shows that PBS Kids was airing. I loved watching Sesame Street, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Curious George, Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, and Barney along with so many others. They were always very entertaining to watch, and because some of these shows were really interactive, I was able to practice and test my skills while watching them. Not only did they teach subjects like English, they also went over basic math and other subjects. However, I still had a lot to learn, and I did face problems because I wasn’t quite so fluent in English yet.

In first grade, when I had transferred to a new school, I was still having problems speaking English and I wasn’t completely fluent in it yet. An incident occurred in the technology lab which has stuck with me since, and what happened still bothers me to this day. I was having trouble working on the computer, and my technology teacher had come over to see what was going on. I tried to explain to her, but I was having trouble using the right words and sentences to describe what was going on. At one point, she got very angry and seemed to be getting impatient, which made her raise her voice at me, saying, “What are you even trying to say?’’ and “Explain to me better!’’ What shocks me to this day is how disrespectful people can be of others because they cannot speak English or are having trouble speaking it, and really, this is not the way a teacher or anyone should act for that matter. Not only did it make me feel pressured, but I grew insecure and scared because of the fact that I was having trouble speaking English. In this situation, my teacher got to a point where she became very frustrated and because I was having trouble speaking a language that I “should have” known. She should have been supportive and helping me along the way to not only understand what I was saying, but also to help me solve the issue I was having on the computer, but instead she was the one who was getting impatient and unwilling to help and acted this way towards me. It affected me a lot and made me realize that not everyone would have open minds and be as understanding as some are. This is due to the fact that they may have grown up in an environment that wasn’t very diverse, so they weren’t familiar with how to act when they came across someone that was foreign.  

Later on in the year, I had improved immensely and the ESOL teacher wanted to see how well I was doing. She took me, along with a few other students, to a room and we sat down at a long table. She put a paper in front of all of us, and then put cardboard up between each test so there would be no cheating. That was the only time I had ever gone to ESOL, and it was good news to me - it meant I was truly becoming fluent in English and compared to the previous year, I was much better at it.

In today’s society, there is a lot of judgment towards others who speak a different language. People who are privileged and obtain dominant cultural capital can use Literacy to their advantage. However, they are not always right, and sometimes these people who are privileged can be negative and have the wrong mindset. In such a diverse society, people should not put others in a place where they are struggling but instead should provide assistance and guidance. This way, literacy can be used in a positive light and can improve all communities.

WORKS CITED:

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Print.

Nossel, Suzanne. "Who Is Entitled to Be Heard?" The Opinion Pages. The New York Times, 11 Nov. 2015. Web.

Freire, Paulo. "Chapter 2." Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1993. N. pag. Webster University. Web.