1. HUMS 300 ePortfolio Truth, Liberty, Justice, And how They Relate to my Life By Dusko Lukic 7/23/2012

2. About These Great Questions Truth helps us make sense of our world. By speaking and acting out of truth, and believing that others are telling us the truth, we manage challenges in our world. Truth can be established with some level of certainty through inquiry (Albanese, Ch. 1) Liberty or freedom is made up of rights that are ours because we are human, and of rights that are given to us by our government (Albanese, Ch. 4) Justice is having our rights respected and observed by others, and respecting others' rights (Albanese, Ch. 3)

3. About Me I was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I spent part of my childhood in Croatia, and part of it in Serbia. All three countries are located in Balkans area of Eastern Europe, and were once republics of country of Yugoslavia. Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia went through a civil war (1991-1995) at the time when I was a child. The war was amongst three ethnic groups: Croats, Muslims, and Serbs. While Serbia was involved in the war, there was no war on its territory. The war was full of loses and casualties for both sides, and ended suddenly without obvious winners and losers.

4. Why I Chose To Talk About These Great Questions Truth, liberty, and justice are important in all our lives. Truth keeps our worlds predictable and trustworthy, liberty allows us and our free will choices, and justice provides us with a sense of safety - a sense that our rights will be respected. The war in Balkans brought a lot of confusion into my life, and the reason why I chose to discuss these three great questions in context of this experience is because I believe that all three were violated in this war.

5. Truth There was plenty of violation of truth during the war. Lies were told out of self-interest, or fear, or out of some other motivation. People lied to one another to gain power or possessions from one another, but also in order to comfort each other in time of crisis, or to alert one another to be more careful or more prepared in case that some crisis happened (e.g., enemy attack). The biggest violation of truth for me during this war is being deceived by government about the reasons why the war happened. Some say that it was out of religious differences amongst three ethnic groups, and others say that it was because of foreign special interests. I would prefer to know the real truth because it would help me make sense of loosing people and places that I love.

6. Liberty This war, as most other wars was the major ground for violation of human rights. People were punished for saying wrong things, for being in wrong places, for being of certain ethnic background, for “looking” a certain way, and for much more. There was no consequences or authority to protect individual liberties. Everyone was very careful not to violate the imposed laws even though they knew that these laws violated their personal liberties. Survival was all that mattered. Because of this past experience, I see liberty as extremely precious and extremely fragile. I know how much I have now that I have liberty again, and I also know how unbearable the life is without it.

7. Justice There was very little justice amongst the three sides at war. The goal of war was to destroy everything that came from or belonged to the enemies, and to impose one's own, whether it was culture, government, or way of life. This violation of justice made no sense because people from all three groups lived, worked, raised their families in the same neighborhoods, and built the country together. Their religious teachings (Christian-Orthodox, Catholic, and Islamic) all originated in the same base religion (Judeo-Christian), which means that they had very similar beliefs. When one knows that something is so precious to him/her, why take that something precious from someone else? It was a strategy of all three sides to communicate to each other that their way of life, culture and government was “wrong”, and that their own was right. The truth is, they all wanted something very similar.

8. Summary I chose to discuss truth, liberty, and justice in context of my childhood experience of war in Balkans in the early nineties. The war was a perfect context where all three of these great questions had a different meaning, and where all that I knew as a child before the war about what truth, liberty, and justice meant was greatly violated. Where truth should serve to help make our worlds reliable, during the war, it was violated when people purposely deceived one another for various reasons. Where liberty should provide us with choices, in the war it was violated as part of strategy to control people. Finally, instead of justice serving to protect and observe human rights, in war it was violated as an attempt of different sides at war to exert their own power.

9. Thank you!