Ashly+A's+Final+AmEx+2015+Speech


 * On the Matter of Mattering**

On June 9th, 2015, at 11:55 PM, I changed my mind on my AmEx final speech topic. I was originally going to talk about feminism, which, don’t get me wrong, is infinitely important. But after watching your speeches, and laughing with you and crying with you from the back of Fitz’s room, I realized that I wanted to respond to that directly.

As individuals, we are intricate, complicated creatures. We’re a mess of hormones and emotions and minerals and proteins, but all of that comes together to form us. It’s easy to forget our place in a vast universe where nihilism tells us that nothing matters and life has no purpose, as Wikipedia describes it. I’ve definitely considered that attitude, trying to gauge how much my actions mattered. Would it matter if I disappeared? If any one of us disappeared? Logic tells us that, no, the Earth would continue rotating and revolving around the Sun. But emotion, and humanity tells us that each of us have endless worth and capabilities, and to lose that is a tragedy.

I learned a lot about individual worth this year. From a cellular level, we are all made up of 37.2 trillion cells. Each of those cells contain DNA, and if you unraveled the DNA in all of your trillions of cells, you could go around the diameter of the Solar System. Twice. Along those miles and miles and miles of strands are all of the components that make you who you are. In a world of test scores, and grades, and impersonal ID numbers, I forgot how much of an individual I am, and you, my colleagues, may have felt the same. I let myself get caught up in the college rat race, harshly criticizing myself to the point where I was being more critical than any college admissions officer might be.

This greatly affected my perception of myself, and it greatly affected my attitude. This year was difficult for me, in terms of how I treated myself and how I shut down and allowed myself to be overwhelmed. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago when I realized just how incredible it is to exist. I was studying for the SAT Biology test, of all things, when I started to consider how microscopic structures in each and every one of us were working like machinery to keep us alive. It’s odd to say this out loud, but it led me to thinking about how much dependency exists on this planet. Our cells depend on us, and we depend on them in return. We depend on each other to pull us out of dark places, and we depend on ourselves to soldier through another day, whether we want to or not.

Junior year was special because of how much dependency and individuality I experienced. In the AmEx class, there were people I agreed with, and disagreed with, but that’s what made the American Experience such a great one. Because, despite all of our differences, we managed to cooperate and be a melting pot of inquisitive intellectuals. In the America I grow old in, I want to see people recognize their own worth, and recognize the worth of others. There are times when society doesn’t recognize the worth and rights of its own inhabitants. Today, we’d like to scoff at the past and say that we are much better off. People may say that we no longer have segregation in our country, or that women are able to vote and be "equal" to men. We have taken steps towards progress. But these steps are small and unsure.

We still have people who are killed through injustice and prejudice. We still have an income gap between men and women, where, according to the New York Times, men out earn women on every rung of the income ladder, despite doing the exact same job. Stereotypes cloud our judgement, and we allow these stereotypes to drown out who someone may **truly** be. When people are victimized, society is quick to blame them in some way. Discrimination and inequality is something that we perceive to be only in history-- yet newspaper headlines and photographs of today contain echoes of the past. To me, this is not a society that values, or benefits all individuals. This is not a society that maintains a healthy balance of dependency, where trust between the governing and the governed is stable and secure. Therefore, I want to see America become that. I want to live in an America where every individual is valued, and truly equal-- where we no longer have the need for hashtags that memorialize someone who had died due to no fault of their own. I began this speech with an urge for you all to recognize your individual worth, but I’m ending it with a call to never forget the worth of others. We are a nation-- a globe-- full of individuals. Because of this, because of our DNA that makes us who we are, and because we are more than numbers and letters, we can spark change. We matter.

[|__http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism__]

[|__http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/basics/dna__]

[|__http://askabiologist.asu.edu/explore/building-blocks-life__]

[|__http://www.sciencefocus.com//qa/how-long-your-dna__]