Truth

My roommate asked me a really interesting question today.

How will George W. Bush's presidency be viewed down the road?

Of course, 69 percent of Americans are happy to see him go. He has the lowest approval rating of any president. He's been virtually snuffed out of the news. No one really cares about him anymore. But what will the history books say?

My roommate's hypothetical situation: Say we ultimately "win the war" on terror. Will Bush be better liked? Or will people still see his decisions as wrong?

My response (after clarifying to her that this is a purely hypothetical situation) was yes and no. I think our generation - mine and my roommate's and anyone older than us - will always see Bush's actions in a negative light, no matter what happens. We're old enough to have friends in Iraq or family members in Afghanistan and those are things you just don't forget. Even if there's a positive outcome to this war, people will still say, "Well, it shouldn't have ever happened in the first place" or "Bush started it but he didn't fix it."

But my 18-year-old brother and his friends are a different story. If something good does happen, their education will focus on the end, not on the initial years. Slowly, people's perceptions of the war will become composed of facts, not emotions. My knowledge of Vietnam and the Persian Gulf wars is based on the facts that I learned in high school, and they don't teach you how close my friends' fathers came to being drafted or how many lives of kids our age were lost. We become detached. And then we forget. And then we make the same mistakes years later. I don't know how many more mistakes we can afford to make.

I think it comes down to the media's responsibility. Unbiased reporting is the core of any story. Yes, opinions are essential and they are the foundation of this country. But leave the opinions on the op-ed page. We need to give people the facts so that years from now, they'll be able to form their opinions based off of truth and not the opinions of 69 percent of the population, however true they may be.