We always need a bad guy

pg. 106, question 1:

In our history, there has never been a situation where there isn't a good guy and a bad guy. Even in our present society, everything is based on the scale of good and evil. These ideas and discriminations are sometimes personal, but in history they are, more often than not, conjured by our societies viewpoint. Our historians decide how we view our history, and there's a big emphasis on "our." The differences between Athens and Sparta is that which we, as an American society, have no authority in constructing that history. Our historians took away what we decided to be important, who we decided was the good guy, and how to retell their history. The interpretation of this history is similar to everything in our current society, easily comparable with international affairs, because we hear "the other side" even less often than affairs within the US. An excellent current example is the issue of Kosovo's independence. The first, and biggest, issue is that Americans virtually have no idea what is going on in Kosovo right now. The small percentage that does know, knows a miniscule amount of information that has been gathered from either picking up a newspaper or hearing about it on the 5 o'clock news. I do, however, still have a little faith in our American culture, that a group of people are adequately educated on this topic. Nonetheless, our second problem is that the group of individuals who are familiar with this problem are only educated by corporate America and are not being shown the different sides and points of views. When our future history books are written, Kosovo's independence will be what is examined by America, rather than the views of the Serbs or Albanians. We have grown up with the ideology that independence is the right thing- no one questions that notion. That is where our problem lies. The group of American's that is aware of problems maintain this viewpoint, pro independence, but they generally don't take into account the repercussions of the things they have accepted to be "right." With Kosovo's independence, the Serb's safety is dramatically threatened and, currently, it seems as thought Kosovo's independence is causing more problems that positive solutions. On the other hand, anyone could argue that the Serbian's safety is less important, because they're radical and setting the US embassy up in flames. I'm sure that I've gone way too far off topic, I seem to be good at this, but being Serbian has made me extremely passionate about this topic. If I wasn't Serbian, I know that I wouldn't have such an opinion either way, in fact, I would probably be for Kosovo's independence. But my personal tie to this topic is the reason that I am able to (relatively) look at this subject as objectively as I can. Does this mean that our historians have to also hold personal ties to events in history in order to document them as "accurately" as possible? I don't know. But I do know that my continuous education of cultural studies and our social problems has made me much more pessimistic about my goal to save the world.