Kai+AMI’s+Final+AmEx+2013+Speech

=Title of Speech= =Putting the Human Back Into Humanity = =Text of Speech= Why do you care about the rings of Saturn? Huh, anyone? Some of you I’m pretty sure your Foothill brains turned on and started thinking of all the scientific formulas and the molecular composition of types of rocks which the rings of Saturn are made of, or the distance that far away planet is from the Earth to try to find some relation of why those rings matter to you. But why? Just answer honestly, you don’t care. Whether Saturn has rings or not, the Earth is still spinning, so therefore it doesn’t effect your world. You’re good. Correct answer: I do not care about he rings of Saturn.

That question, random as it is, was one of the college admissions essay prompts from University of Chicago which was written on the board in Kindred’s class. It didn’t stand out to me at first as anything more than a prompt which I didn’t wish to answer. Until I started looking beyond the rings of Saturn, not literally into space, but looking at the message which I found buried in those words.

People don’t care. They do not care about anything beyond what’s in their own line of view, anything that they can not tangibly touch and feel, they don’t care about issues outside of their own suburban idealized world. Unless it has some bearing on their own life or happiness, THEY DON’T CARE. This pisses me off and pains my heart, all at the same time. I don’t know if I wish to educate people or to just hope our whole species dies off before we completely ruin the world. This sounds extreme, but at the rate which we are traveling towards the utter destruction of our Earth through means of pollution, industrialization, and just utter lack of compassion for the fellow man, we are our own walking, breathing, talking apocalypse. We are our own Dooms Day. Hypocritical. That’s what I am. Proudly. I’m a liberal, but I consider myself conservative. Well, if you count conserving the environment.

A little fun fact about human nature: If something is in their way of getting what they want, they will kill it.

This may seem like a minor thing to most people, but let me argue my point. So, you see a bee. It’s flying around you - in your head this bee has all the sudden transformed from its measly insect body into a blood thirsty shark circling it’s pray before making the kill. The bee buzzes in your ear - it has now transformed into a screaming B-52 bomber flying through the air. It lands on your shoulder - it is now a land mine, if you do not de-arm it first, it will kill you. Survival of the fittest, right? Squish! Now my question is, what did that bee ever do to you? Invade your space? Oh big whoop! People do it all the time. My point is that besides its stinger which undoubtedly wouldn’t have killed you, that bee could not defend itself. It was simply in your space, so you killed it. It had no chance. This is the human way of handling problems, something is in your way, you get rid of it. The act of killing bugs isn’t the big issue, it’s the mentality behind it, because people take this same superior ideology of feeling that they are more entitled to life than others around them into bigger arenas. If I’m the only one who sees something wrong with this mentality, then apparently I was born into the wrong species.

Humans were accurately depicted in James Cameron’s Avatar. As monsters, a parasite that invades a host, sucks it dry of resources and does not turn back to pity the withered heap which it just destroyed. In the movie, humans went to the planet of Pandora which had its own civilizations and ecosystems all in perfect harmony, sensitive to the touch. Much to this peaceful planet’s disadvantage, they had something the humans wanted. James Cameron chose to call this desired substance “Unobtainium”, I’d be curious to ask Mr. Cameron about his own motives for giving the element such a peculiar name. It was clear he was trying to make a point about human nature. Humans will do whatever it takes to get what they want, and they will get it. But at steep prices. And worse, they’ll still want more. I almost cry when I think of the poor blue faces of the Na’vi people who were decimated in the film, for one thing because I wanted to be one of them. But secondly because the story too closely resembles events that are happening today, not on far away planets, though people try to act like it, here on Earth. In the Amazon and forests all over the Earth. The Amazon in Ecuador in particular has fallen victim to the worst disease on the planet: humans. The “unobtainium”? Oil and tree products such as paper. The Na’vi people? The natives of the region who live in and off of the forest. The damage? Millions of lost species of plant, bug, and animal. Millions of acres of life giving forest destroyed, water contaminated, and oxygen creating machines stripped from the Earth which we so desperately needed in this time of Global Warming. Whole tribes and families of people displaced from their native lands, losing their unique culture along with their homes, losing their lives to cancer from the fumes and contamination left from oil drilling in the Amazon. But people do not care, because we can’t see it. We see numbers on a page of how much rainforest is being destroyed per second, that number is 1.5 acres per second if you were curious, but it doesn’t matter to us. Each piece of paper we waste is responsible for that, WE are responsible for that.

Anyone who knows me, knows that if I were to get in a fight, it wouldn’t be over a boy or not even in a basketball game, but I will sure as hell get down with someone if they waste paper. If only I could properly describe the level of fury that overcomes me, how intoxicated with frustration I become when people respond to my humble pleas to save a piece of paper that they were in the process of unnecessarily wasting with “Why does it matter? The tree is already cut.” No, I hope you don’t plan on majoring in business or anything in the marketing industry when you go off to college. It’s called “supply and demand”. Yes, that one tree is already cut but there are a million more which companies are waiting to cut, all they need is your command, and your demand for more paper supply after you just wasted the last one, is the call they wanted.

On the topic of wasted paper, I wish to someday fire every member of the Modern Language Association for inventing MLA format and for convincing the rest of the world that it should be put to use. I used to think it was invented by some lazy student who just wanted their inadequate term paper to look longer. To hear it was invented by an educated organization shames me. Idiots. No, I do not think they considered the extensive outcomes of their stupid double spacing and 1 inch margins. But I say it’s wasted paper. This may sound extreme, but it’s really not. Every high school teaches this method of formatting, and every student uses it in high schools and colleges around the world. An essay was 7 pages, no you double space it, and it becomes 14. Once you hit print, you are using twice the amount of paper you really needed. My examples are purposefully simplified, MLA format and killing bees? Changing these two things won’t save the world, but it requires a higher sense of awareness. To stop and think before you act, is a highly undervalued skill. We could save so much by just cutting down in little ways. It frustrates me to the core, that so much could be done, yet so little is. That is another one of my frustrations with our world, our tactics for overcoming the issues we are facing. It seems to me, generations before us were fighting wars over seas, in tanks and in combat, our generation will not even have that chance because it would first have to overcome the wars which are taking place inside our own minds. We are not even capable of taking part in something so great as the generations before us such a The Great Generation or the social revolutionaries of the 60’s and 70’s, because it appears to me that our generation does not have the capability to be truly passionate about something.

Example: Kony. Be honest, you didn’t give a shit. Okay, yes, the Stop Kony campaign turned out o be a scam, but the reaction it ignited in people was real. Word got out and people began to respond. But be honest with yourself, the videos were moving but your motivations were not truly anchored in the welfare of Africa’s children. You just wanted to post it on your Facebook so that people would think you’re a wholesome, sensitive, worldly person. And true to trend, the second #stopkony was no longer found on the “Discover” page on twitter. The plight of the poor victims of the issue were no longer found on your page, or in your heart. Poof! Out of sight, out of mind. This is sad. What can we accomplish if we can not truly set our minds and our masses to a cause? I feel the reasoning behind this is that people feel they can not make a difference. An individual in today’s world feels small compared to the vastness of our population and of our Earth. But that does not take away from the impact of personal choices. I’m here to say that one person may not be able to impact the world immediately, but they can change their own world. Which makes a difference when these small efforts are added up. Like Michael Jackson preached, “I’m starting with the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways, and no message could have been any clearer: if you wanna make the world a better place, you gotta look at yourself and make a change”.

Thinking that one man can change the world is a cliché notion that died and was buried right next to the American Dream in the cemetery of American ideals that are now folklore. But that does not mean that you should let go of your own personal responsibility for the world’s welfare. You may not be the sole cause for our world’s ailments, but you are about 1 six billionth of the problem. So why not reduce your guilt in the crime?

Humanity is the collective qualities of human beings, the qualities or characteristics considered as a whole to be characteristic of human beings. Total. All together. Added up. We are each pieces of humanity. So yes, just because you chose to see the outside world only through your own rose colored glass window, ignoring the issues hidden just beyond, does not mean they don’t affect you. They affect something greater. They affect humanity.

A big issue in our world today is that people do not know how to decipher between wants and needs. It’s a very complex relationship between the two. Years ago before all our advanced technology and labor reducing methods of receiving food, transportation, and making money, the difference between what you want and what you need was much more clear, simply because things were harder to get. All our “progress” has heavily blurred the line between wants and needs because you can get both so easily. It blows my mind and weighs on my heart all the things that we could be conserving with just a little more awareness, just a little more self-control, just a little more responsibility put back on ourselves; just a little discretion between wants and needs.

How I personally think of things, my own little philosophy, is to question how much using something will benefit me verses how much it would benefit the world for me to not use it, to conserve it. When Mr. Geib says “pull out a blank piece of paper” and you already know well and good that this is not going to be something you will have to turn in, why not use the back of a paper that isn’t used? Because it won’t look as pretty? Suck it up. Those little things matter. It takes a great sense of awareness and maturity to determine the difference between a want and a need. I know, you want a pretty new sheet of clean paper to write down your whopping two sentences on, but do you need to, no. The bee? He is causing you merely seconds of discomfort, then he will certainly realize that you are not a flower and will continue on his way. Is the fact that the bee is bothering you, truly worth you taking its life? If you say yes, then God help your soul, you selfish asshole. These are little things but the thinking behind them is related to bigger issues. When asking these questions, try not to be selfish. You’ll be amazed with how much less you truly need.

People only care about things that affect them. But in the grander scale of things, out there somewhere in the universe, possibly now orbiting the rings of Saturn since we as a people have strayed so far away from it, is humanity. Humanity is not just a noun, it is a connection and we’re all involved in it. The sum of all our doings, all our intentions and all our cares, are all accounted for in humanity. And each injustice we permit, each day we continue to bite the hand that feeds us in the damaging of our Earth, is a blow towards humanity. I feel no matter how strong your conscience is or how little you care for others, your efforts towards improving humanity in our world, or your lack of, will rest on your soul. In the world in which I wish to grow old in, I hope to see blind eyes regain sight. Regain sight of what’s important and to regain a sense of responsibility for the consequences of our personal actions, no matter how small they may seem. I hope that individuals will make individual choices that will affect the whole, for the better. People will care for other people, whether they are continents away or whether they are sitting right next to you in AmEx; truly out of compassion, not for the sake of personal gain. I hope to see people who do not only care for people but who care for all living things on this Earth, people who not only live in their environment but take care of it. I hope to see people who don’t just live for themselves, but live for those who are to come as well. Humans for humanity.

=Cite Your Sources=