Tiananmen Square

Wow. Absolutely unreal. Today was the first time I heard about these events and I'm still in shock. The pure heartless and brutal actions of the soldiers are hard to fathom. I don't even know what to say. I'm especially stunned upon learning that the soldiers just shot almost at random. They killed women and children watching from balconies and in some reports they even shot other soldiers. Human life was treated like a grain of salt...unreal....

As for the tank man. What he did took a tremendous amount of courage and guile and his act was noticed around the world. Time Magazine even named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. However, I don't understand why he did what he did. This is going to sound critical, but I don't believe that his act was all that special. I understand that the Chinese were fed up at this point and this man had reached his boiling point, but why stop the tanks from leaving Tiananmen Square? What sense did this make? The army was on their way out and the tank man temporarily stopped them. Why? It seems like a senseless act to me. If he really wanted to make a statement against the evil that the Chinese government displayed in Tiananmen Square wouldn't his actions have been better served stopping the tanks from entering the square in the first place?...