Response to May Day

May day is an interesting holiday for Americans to study, we don't really know it exists, we don't celebrate it and we don't know what its about.  learning about history, either yours or anyone else's, can make your life more meaningful because you understand the world.

Knowing your history just as a form of knowledge helps you improve.  The reason why we study history is mainly to study the mistakes we made in the past, May Day is a holiday that commemorates the struggle for workers to have appropriate working conditions, and it remembers the deaths of those who fought for their rights.  By remembering the mistakes that led up to those riots i.e. the abuse of workers, the governments lack of intervention  and the violence of policemen towards the protesters, we can learn from them and live better lives by not repeating those mistakes.

Knowing history also improves relations with people and helps us to understand people.  Many argue that the reason why the world hates, some say hated, America is because we intervene in problems that we don't fully understand.  America is currently involved in the middle east, which has many different cultures within it that have fought for hundreds of years, not understanding who fought for what and against who etc. leads to unseen conflicts based on historical backgrounds.  The same is true for small scale conflicts, not knowing the relationships people have with each other can lead to problems.  Most conflicts are caused by people offending other people because they don't know what offends them, learning who gets offended by what will make it easier to avoid conflicts. 

Overall any information we can learn from will make our lives better, learning other peoples histories will allow us to interact with them without the risk of offending them, and learning our own past mistakes will help us to avoid repeating them.