Hats Off to Abe

As assigned, I wrote a short speech (instead of a paragraph) with the tone, content, and ideals that I believe Abraham Lincoln would have expressed in the face of the situation in Madison, Wisconsin this year. It is as follows:

        I stand before you today, seven score and nine years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, to once again defend the strength of the Union, although this time it is a Union of a different sort. Having completed neither high school nor college, I stand before you as an esoteric outlier. 

Though I received little formal schooling in my day, my day was far different than the day in which we have gathered on the steps of the Capital of the great state of Wisconsin. During my upbringing, although formal schooling was hard to come by, I always had a deep yearning to grow in my education. I read voraciously whenever the opportunity presented itself.  I would have been thrown into a joyous frenzy if I was given so much as a glimpse of the education system of today. Without my self-teaching I would never have become the man I was, and without the chance to expand their minds via education, I fear many a child will not grow into the men and women America needs them to be. 

But my speech today is about more than the importance of education; it is about the vitality of unity in America. Without our unity, we are simply men and women alone and vulnerable. In no instance is this more true than in the case of our construction workers, our plumbers and pipe fitters, our electricians, and the people with which we entrust the future of this great nation, our teachers. With that, I stand before you today citizens of Wisconsin, and I implore you to stand together. Stand together for today. Stand together for our future. 

Another Angle

A lot of people have things they read or refer to when they need to find their center. For some people maybe it's Walden or even Goodnight Moon (which I also love). Personally, when I need to stop and make sense of the world around me, I reread the speech David Foster Wallace gave to Kenyon College's graduating class of 2005. I'll even go so far as to completely overgeneralize and boil it down to a single sentence for those of you who aren't too keen on reading: Believe it or not, you're not the center of the universe. (I'll also provide a link to those of you who do want to read it: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html)

Now to some people this comes as a shock to some people. And the way I worded it there was to an extent intentionally inflammatory (that's what you get for not wanting to read the actual speech). What prompts me to post about this specifically this evening? Indirectly, and I have to be delicate here in order to not contradict myself, it is the announcement of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Perhaps more accurately, it is the explosion if social media around the event. This historic event has helped me realize that social media outlets contradict completely the way of thinking David Foster Wallace expounds on in his speech. Social media is a soapbox from which anyone and their 12 year old cousin can yell into space about how they feel and post their prom pictures. It allows you to create a universe in which you very much are the epicenter.

And maybe you're thinking, "Dude, you're the one blogging about this not me, you dumb hypocrite!" Or maybe you're not quite that mean, but you're politely questioning if this is simply another one of the aforementioned self-indulgent and often insufferable shouts into space. If you are asking that, I would like to state very plainly it is not. I'm not posting on here about the events or potential resulting consequences of the killing of Osama bin Laden. I could very well do that, but frankly, I don't think I'm at all qualified. To my knowledge, most of my friends on facebook don't really know very much about international relations or political theory. A couple of them could make some pretty clever quips and that's great. But at the end of the day, maybe all these status updates and tweets are clever and well-received, but what is shouting into space going to change?

What this is for me, is a questioning of the value having a Facebook or a Twitter account. It is me wondering if I'm actually so self-indulgent that I believe it is a constructive use of other people's time to read the small segment of a Phish song I found to be important at the time. It is a reflection on what appears to me to be collective shift toward egotism. If I hadn't already ranted for about 500 words already I could very easily apply what I'm talking about to Putnam and DeTocqueville, but tonight, o be blunt, I'd rather not. I'm not posting this because I know the answers; I'm posting it because I believe that the relationship between people and social media is one that is worth investigating. I'm posting this because maybe somewhere beneath tonight's overwhelming display of clever quipping and rarely matched nationalism, lives a problem in the way we see the world. And I don't care if you "like" it or not.