25._Social_changes_over_the_recent_decades

Terrorist attacks are usually unpredictable, no one knows when and where it could happen, and create atmosphere of fear, which lead to achieve political aims.

Methods used to intimidate people can be for example, a bomb attack, suicide raid, kidnapping of an important person, hijacking, use of chemical, biologic or atomic weapons and many others.

Countries of almost whole world cooperate to fight against terrorism and it´s really important, because people have to show terrorists that they are not afraid and they want it to end.

Some of the well-known examples of terrorist attacks are the hijacking of the several American airplanes on the 11th of September 2001, which struck the buildings of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC. Both towers of the WTC collapsed and about 3,000 people died there. After this the USA started the war in Afghanistan against al-Quaida which confessed to those attacks. A lot of people realized that terrorism is a very serious problem after this event because it was totally unpredictable, a large amount of people died there and the terrifying fact also was that the terrorists dared to assault such a powerful country as the USA. Since this date, airport controls have become much stricter than before.

Another serious event is the explosion of three bombs in the London Underground on the 7th of July 2005 when at least 50 people were killed. And probably the most recent one is the suicide bomb attack at Moscow Airport where 35 people died.

Another social problem is connected with the differences of cultures, races and nations. Racism is a behaviour or an opinion of people, which are convinced, that their race is better than the others, they have a feeling of superiority. It is usually related with xenophobia. It´s a fear of different cultures, religions, customs, traditions and a world view. This problem is mainly connected with the United States, where Afro-americans were slaves for a long time, and after the abolition of slavery by Abraham Lincoln, they were still considered as „the other race“ – there were for example special schools for them. But I think this problem has been getting better recently. People in the USA fight very strongly against this kind of discrimination. A sign of decreasing racism is also the fact that Barack Obama, the current American president, is Afro-american and Americans seem not to mind his race.

In the CR, there is a typical problem with Romanies, also called Gypsies. They want to be Czech citizens and they fight hard against discrimination, but in fact, they don’t behave as a „normal“ citizens very often - they refuse to pay taxes as other people and they want to have even more benefits and conveniences and when they don’t get them, they argue about discrimination. I think this problem is very controversial and difficult to solve. Many Romanies don’t want to pay because they don’t have much money, but they would have much more money, if they started to work or study more. They have no ambitions and don´t want to be educated. So they often enrich themselves through shoplifting, stealing and other criminal acts. I would say that the real problem is also in our low tolerance. It´s also problem with the immigrants. Czechs don’t like foreigners very much, they often think they want to steal their jobs and work opportunities. They also have different customs and traditions and aren´t able to assimilate here. On the other hand they work on positions which aren’t good enough for Czechs. We can find for example, a lot of the Ukrainians in the building industries and a lot of Vietnamese people have opened groceries. They work very hard and they are also very polite.