War and Conflict (Blog Post 3)

The story "That Only a Mother," was very interesting story conceptually. A quick synopsis of the story is: a mother named Margaret gives birth to a mutated child as she waits for her husband Hank to respond to her letters and come home. However, this story left me with more questions than answers. Did Hank kill the baby at the end? In the story it says, "His fingers tightened on his child," so did he squeeze his baby to death because how freakish she was?  Was Margaret that obsessed with having normal child she overlooked the fact that  her child had no limbs and was practically a stump? Or was she so obsessed with having a normal child (that wasn't affected by the radiation too badly) that she literally didn't know her child was limbless and that's why she didn't tell Hank about the baby's deformities? Besides the burning questions this story has left me with, this story reminds me of domesticity of a woman in a way. Margret was just a stay at home wife, waiting  for her husband to come home while loving and caring for a mutated baby with a face (and body) only a mother could love.

            In the story “We See Things Differently” by Bruce Sterling, a Arab man named Sayyid Qutb visits a future run-down America as a reporter. This story actually parallels to modern day society and how the outside world views Americans. For example, I was watching YouTube and this particular video by BuzzFeedNews (I love that channel) and this British man said “I love to laugh at you Americans.” Though a lot of people do love Americans, we tend to overlook that there is a great ocean of people in the world that detest Americans and think of us as "jahiliyah-- the land of the ignorance.This was America.The Great Satan, the Arsenal of Imperialism, the Bankroller of Zionism, Bastion of Neo-Colonialism." As a Bahamian (though the Bahamas and the States have close relations), I can completely understand the feelings of the other nations, believing Americans have the culture of no culture and destruction. But I do not understand how someone can hate the ignorance of a country to the degree that he is willing to not only take the lives of the citizens who inhabit  this "impure" country, but willing to take his own life also (just as the unnamed man Sayyid did).