My third TED talk is entitled “Women, Wartime, and the Dream of Peace” by Zainab Salbi. Salbi’s main point is that, as a society, we have only acknowledged one side of war, even though there are really two sides. When she says two sides, she doesn’t mean “good versus evil,” she means one side is the people who are fighting the war, and the other is the people who stay at home and try to keep business-as-usual. She noted that women were usually the ones who stayed behind and held down the fort. She uses a lot of imagery to keep the audience interested and this helps them be able to picture the scenario in which she is describing. Salib uses ethos to show that she knows what she is talking about when she tells her story of life during wartime and because she started an organization to aid the women of war. She used pathos when describing what it was like to have bombs dropped outside of her window. This was affective because the way she described it, you could close your eyes and see the windows shaking and the heat of explosions burning your skin.I, personally, did not like this TED talk as much as the others. Although I do believe in women’s rights, I feel like this is pushing it. The way I understood this talk, I felt like she was taking away credit from those who voluntarily stand in front of bullets every day, for weeks and months, male or female soldiers. I also feel like the speaker took away from the fact that war, sometimes, is necessary and she discounted going to war, at all. Do I believe that some war is unnecessary? Yes. But, In my opinion, some wars are unavoidable. If Salib does not really feel this way about war, I think she needs to be more clear and acknowledge the brave men and WOMEN who risk their lives daily, so that they can protect her and her family. This fits into the American dream because if it weren’t for war, we would not have the same freedoms we do now. The Declaration of Independence (which we read in class) states all the reasons that we went to war with Great Britain, and gaining more freedoms, was one of them. I believe that America is one of the nations in the world with the most freedoms and that is because we stick up for ourselves, through words and through war. I do believe, however, that she has a point when she says, “How casually we treat casualties in the context of this topic. This is where we conceive of rape and casualties as inevitabilities. Eighty percent of refugees around the world are women and children. Oh. Ninety percent of modern war casualties are civilians. Seventy-five percent of them are women and children. How interesting” (Salbi). I believe that leaders need to be more cautious and more considerate of the people that are dying, when they just haul off and go to war. After all, what is the point of going to war, if all the people you are trying to defend are getting killed in the process?