Are people of the world more alike than different, or more different than alike?
I would honestly say, a little of both. In this piece, people is being referred to child soldiers, Ishmael Beah, and the people of Sierra Leone, Africa. I would say that all of these people are all alike in many ways. They all are people of Sierra Leone. They also have the same cultural experiences as most of the other people in Sierra Leone. Childhood, was a very different story for most of the people in this region of Africa though. Most of the children of Sierra Leone were either killed or captured and forced into being a child soldier, due to the RUF (Rebel Union Forces). The RUF was not an organization that you wanted to mess around with. As Beah put it, they would run down entire villages during the night and not even blink twice. They would go about their day talking about how many civilians they have killed or how many villages they have burned or the women they have raped. Beauty was lost when the RUF tried to take over Sierra Leone. Ishmael still sees Sierra Leone as a beautiful country that he calls home and how everybody in America looks at Sierra Leone wrongly due to the Hollywood media. When the movie Blood Diamond came out, starring Leonardo DeCaprio, Beah just laughed. He thought it was funny how America viewed all of Africa looking exactly like Kenya. “Not all of Africa looks like Kenya, ” said Beah. Therefore, in that aspect, not everybody is all alike. One reason, according to “The Blood Diamond,” why the RUF was doing all these horrible things to their own people is because they thought the government was controling them too much. The RUF would hack off their prisoner’s (their own native people) hands because they didn’t want them to vote. They would hack off their legs so they couldn’t run. If they thought you were worthy enough, they would make you work in the mines. They would mine for diamonds that would pay for their cause in the civil war they were creating. Villagers would be disrespectfully shot in the back with no hesitation by children around the age of 12. The RUF would brainwash them. Since they were young it was easy to do. They would tell them that they don’t need to be told what to do by their parents or the government and that they were stronger, higher above all others. The RUF would put these child soldiers on drugs and addict them to the drugs so that they would have no remorse when going into a village to burn. The children were told they were “invincible.” The only thing they wanted inside the heads of each child they brainwashed, was the thought of being a killer and that there would be applause afterwards. Not consequences or anybody telling them, “No.” Ishmael Beah remembers going into a village, his home village, and having to burn it down. Then when he thought he found his family it was already burning. No child or anybody for that matter should have to go through that difficult life style. With all of this being said, I would almost say that, yes, people can be more alike than different, but in this situation in Sierra Leone, the civilians and the RUF are very different with their views. Environment has another role in this decision of “are people more alike than different.” The RUF does everything in their power to scare people into joining their cause, to be more like them in a way. So, in a way, I think people can be either more alike or different to themselves. I mean, speaking more toward child soldiers that is, is that they are completely different people almost once or if they are saved from being a child soldier. It completely traumatizes them. They are frightened by the amount of death that has been around them and/or that they have caused. Plus, the fact that most of them were forced to murder their own family and that if they get saved, they are having to completely change their lifestyle and way of thinking again. They were being forced to grow up to manhood at an incredible rate and basically skip childhood by staring war in the face. It’s almost as if their life passed by them and they had no way to control that matter. The outcomes of the actions of the RUF not only ruined the lives of their own people’s children but also their own and their native people (the parents and families of the children and people that were shot down in cold blood). All in all, I guess what I am trying to say, is that people can be very different at time, though very much alike in another.