Drug war and its cost

In today’s economy, where uncertainty and corruption are now common place in many governments, people are finding this world to have a bleak future. Many people are becoming depressed due to the negative effects of a weakened economy. Fewer jobs means less work available to sustain family life and also that many people including young children are beginning to look at drug trafficking as a well funded and good paying job. In the article I read from the beginning of this year, CNN gave a rough summary of the cost and effects of the Mexican drug war on the United States and Mexico. Over the past five years nearly 48,000 people have been killed due to drug violence and this is excluding the almost 5,000 people that have simply gone missing from the face of the earth. Citizens on both sides are frightened of what might happen in the near future, as people everyday are shot, killed, abducted, stabbed, and on and on with even torture becoming prominent in Mexico. Though many U.S. citizens would say the drug war is a bad thing for us on the states side, the reality is that Mexican citizens are suffering the most from this war. The current President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon had to declare war on the cartels using military force because citizens everyday were dying in the hundreds. Truly the terror of these cartels was so terrifying that even the police were not enough to protect the citizens of the United States.

The Road has many eye opening points and parts that simply evoke emotion. For me the most memorable part so far was on page 77 when the boy was cowled up in a blanket he asked “Are we still the good guys?” the father responded “Yes. We’re still the good guys. And we always will be. Yes. We always will be” This small and brief exert from the book has a huge affect on me as the reader. After killing the man that held the son at knife point, the father and boy ran away. No doubt the son was traumatized by the event and the fact that they killed a man severely bothered him. His father continues to tell him throughout the story that they are the good guys, meaning the ones that are supposedly in the right and are “good” in nature. For the boy this conflict of doing something like killing seems to conflict with his perception of good.  This part of the book is also my favorite sentence from the book, well few sentences anyway.  Just a few pages before, the author describes the bandit that held the boy at knife point. On page 63 the father says “Eyes collared in cups of grime and deeply sunk. Like an animal inside a skull looking out the eye holes. He wore a beard that had been cut square across the bottom with shears and he had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with and ill formed notion of their appearance.” This description of the man shows the decrepit and evil looking appearance of the man and just how terrifyingly despicable he looks. The use of such descriptive language serves to elaborate what the bad guys look like.

 http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/15/world/mexico-drug-war-essay/index.html