Shelly+L’s+Final+AmEx+2014+Speech

=Title of Speech= Judge People by Content of their Character/ Live the Life you Want to Live

=Text of Speech= More and more, especially over the past couple years, people have become addicted to looking and acting perfect when in front of others. To achieve such goal, many have relied on heavy makeups or even more seriously, plastic surgeries. Why do people do that? Isn’t it tiring to act as somebody else every day?

The answer lies on the culture of today’s society. Today, many people judge others not by the content of their character but merely by how they look-their superficial layer. You can look good but have a corrupted inner core and people would still like you as compared to others who have angelic qualities but look quite the opposite. If you look good, you would have a slight advantage over others who may look just average.

Then the question lies, why do pretty people get the advantage? Well, according to Dr. Sommer, humans, like many other animals, are attracted to beautiful things; we just love looking at beautiful faces. Even babies, according to him, spend more time gazing at attractive faces. I mean we can always trust babies; they never lie.

But, even if humans were born with such tendency, it wouldn’t have such a big effect on today’s society as pushing someone to change his or her face and body through surgeries. The true cause to this extreme action is the media. The media exploits the human instinct and mass-reproduces false imageries that become truths to those who drink in whatever the media pours into their mouths (and unfortunately, this group of people is the majority). Through the media, bewildered people get that being skinny or having the perfect face features that fit into some kind of golden racial mask is what we all called beauty.

This is totally wrong. Beauty does have a minor part associated with the superficial layer of people but it also have a greater part that is directly linked to the inner qualities of us. Those who believe that beauty is determined by how we look should seriously change their view points for our exteriors, no matter how angelic we look, would deteriorate with age; what truly stay are our inner qualities. When we die, we would not wish others to remember us as pretty but rather kind.

In the America I grow old in, I want to see more people valuing someone’s inner qualities and potentials over his or her look.

Now this brings me to the second point of my speech. Since the wish I stated earlier is not very likely to be accomplished by people of today’s society, we would all then have alternatives into solving the issue.

As stated earlier, we are constantly being judged on how we look rather than how we treat others. We, the victims, can all change this culture. We don’t have to care about what others think of us. Furthermore, we don’t have to change ourselves to accommodate others and to fit into the society. Why can’t we just live our lives as an outsider “excluded” by the society and spend our whole life pursuing our dreams and making fun of the stupid things that people inside the circle or the society do to pursue their falsified dreams that they create by changing themselves? By not conforming, we can separate ourselves from the false reality, enabling us to gain more profound insights as to what life is and what we are truly living for.

People who ceded to the society are also those who strengthened the power of their enemy that eventually destroys their individualities. They would become part of the society and pressure those who are still struggling to maintain their views of how they see the world.

Life is short and I want to enjoy it. I don’t want to grow old as part of the society and realize one day when I am 70 that I wasted my whole life searching for the falsified dream and living a life that others want me to live in. I don’t want to come to such understanding and die the next day unfortunately with none of my real goals accomplished. To me, a life based on conformity is one based on nothingness.

In the America that I want to live in, I want to see more people being judged by the content of their character rather than their superficial layer.

In the America that I want to grow old in, I want to see more people rebelling and less people conforming. I want to see more people living their lives to their full potentials and eventually changing the society.