I just received an e-mail from one of the asian student organization on campus. it was asking people to sign a petition for the fishermen who were killed by the chinese marine police. I suppose that curiosity prompted me to look into this further, so I went to LexisNexis (a very good source to get news from all over the world, so you can see the different view points from different people) to see if I could find something about the matter.

There weren't a lot of articles about this news...only 10.

After reading the news from the two countries and from some other European countries, I realized that the incident didn't just happen for no reason. Apparently, China opened fire because the Chinese fishermen radioed asking for help against some fishermen robbers from the other country. They found machine guns and the stolen nets and fish haul that's worth 3 million yuan on the robber boats. (you wonder why fishermen carry machine guns with them when they go out to fish...it's not like there are "bears" that would jump out and attack you.) On the other hand, the victim country reported that their innocent people who were just trying to make a living were killed for no apparent reason. Maybe we the spectators will never find out who is right or who is wrong... but reading about it helped me to understand the story better...

then, i went back to read the petition...and realized how the petition was written with a lot of emotions and sentiments. It reminded me of Dr. Rip and how he always says, "what is this? it just makes your women all warm and fussy inside, but it is NOT SCIENCE..." Do we really know the cause of this unfortunately event by reading the petition? It never mentioned anything. It only told you about the results of the shooting. the famous x-file quote, "the truth is out there." do you want to spend time and look for it or do you just want to sit and wait for it to come to you? the fact is, truth will never come to you unless you take the action and search for it.