Carlos+C’s+Final+AmEx+2014+Speech

=Title of Speech= The Gravity Paradox

=Text of Speech=

So, can you feel it? Mr. Geib, are you aware of what’s going on right now? Let me give you a hint. *jumps off chair* Still don’t have it? It’s gravity. You’d all forgotten about it, huh? Well rest assured, I think that everyone else has too, and by everyone, I mean everything that can think on this planet. I had forgotten as well, until this past weekend, which was when I took the beginning part of a SCUBA course down at the harbor, where I spent three hours breathing underwater. It was really, really awesome; it felt like I was flying, able to move into whatever direction I wanted to in a three dimensional realm. It wasn’t until that night that I realized something had changed in me though. I was walking across the street, when I found myself on the tip of my toes, leaning up, trying to rise. I immediately grounded myself. I can’t fly. Duh. But I’d just tried to defy gravity. Because I had lived with it for so long, I hadn’t realized how much it has restrained me. It was ticking me off...I felt landlocked, claustrophobic, chained to a two dimensional, heavy world. I feel now the need for weightlessness again; its truly one of the best feelings.

My SCUBA experience taught me a lot. First and foremost, I found that gravity is a downer (literally). I actually had a dream where I was eaten by an orca, that night, because I couldn’t fly. But it was more than that, really. I had realized that I was living with a force that every other human being lives with on a daily basis, and that most of us do not even notice. How often do we neglect to consider even the most fundamental force that impacts us all? Is it it’s omnipotence that causes us to forget about it? Because we live with it every day? With this new perception, what else can you think of that every single human on this planet lives with? I’m not talking about physical forces now. I’m talking about that one freshman in the hallway, the one that you pass by every day as he eats his lunch alone in the hallway by the D Pod. I’m talking about the homeless man with the beanie that wanders around this town. I’m talking about the poverty, the hunger, the disease, the violence, everything that we see in this world, on the news, on the streets. Have we become desensitized to it, just as we have to gravity? I know I have. At times, I’ve been so caught up with life, with school, with the ACT, with college, with meaningless, trivial things, that I’ve forgotten that while I might be studying for an exam, a teenage girl in India is being gang raped. I’ve found that it is very easy to lose perspective of global issues that every person is subject to, in one way or another, at one time, or the next.

One might ask, “so how does that affect me?” Well, how does gravity affect us? It keeps us held to the ground. It keeps cars on roads and coffee in cups and when people are in cars with cups it spills the coffee onto their lap. It keeps homes on the ground, babies falling over, and people like me doing crazy stuff to get out of its pull. Something that we don’t think about at all, but that has shaped life as we know it. We just don’t perceive it to have such a great impact because it affects us constantly. Quite the paradox, right? So in response to the aforementioned question, I think we can find it apparent that even though we might not perceive something to affect us, it can be doing so constantly. With this understanding, what can we see now that we hadn’t before? Will we be able to see the lonely freshmen in the world now? Will we stop to consider the man in the beanie? How about all of the big global issues? How about God? Even though God is not physically present in the room, lack of perception does not inherently imply nonexistence, as we’ve seen with gravity. Well, will we acknowledge them, and give credence that just because these issues might not be on our doorstep, and we don’t perceive them on a daily basis, that they can still have a huge impact? I know that it is possible for us to do this. But there needs to be a catalyst, something that pushes us over the edge.

Lets take the gravity paradox again. Up until this past weekend, I hadn’t noticed it. But what caused it that to change? For me, it was partly from being in an environment in which the effects of gravity were mitigated, where they were almost absent. I was weightless, floating effortlessly. I didn’t realize its effect, however, until I was back under its pull, until I was living with it again. It wasn’t until I tried to defy it that I realized I couldn’t. So how about other issues? How do we become cognisant of the fact that these issues are happening in the world as I speak, as you listen? What will be our catalyst? I think the answer lies in what we choose to do, in our actions. Up until I made the choice to dive, I had been living the same ordinary life, more or less. It wasn’t until I disrupted my daily pattern did I discover I had been living with something else. I had to go out of my way to do it, but once I did, well, now I’ve realized something new. Hence, the beauty in change.

Now, the only question that remains is what to do with this information. What do we do once we start seeing more people eating lunch by themselves in the quad? When we see more homeless people seemingly form up from the sidewalk? When we realize that bad things are happening around the world? In regards to my gravity situation, I think the first step is in giving credence to both sides. As much as it’s cool to float, I think that we can all agree that gravity is most definitely a good thing. Big time. I find it good, even though I wouldn’t mind doing without every once and a while. With this in mind, the next equally important step is to work towards what you want. Mahatma Ghandi had it right when he said “be the change you wish to see in the world”. So what do I want to do if I want to feel weightless? I go and do something that will make me feel weightless. Pretty simple. This might result in me going out of my comfort zone, because there are most definitely some big, shark shaped risks associated with what I have to do, but to achieve what I want, I have to accept them. The same goes with anything else. To be the change we wish to see in the world, we all will have to step out of our comfort zone. That doesn’t mean to go and yell and fight with other people, trying to force to believe what you do. Nothing is going to change that way. But compromise. See the truth in what other people believe, in what they have to go through. Then act on it, respectfully.

In the America that I grow old in, I will be the be the change that I want to see. I want to see other Americans making changes in their life, change that will allow them not allow to realize what is going on around them, but also empower them to act on what they see. Just because something is a constant doesn’t mean we should ever stop trying to beat it. Don’t give up. I want us to be a courageous people, unafraid to stand up for what we believe in, but also realizing that we can never make change if we don’t try to work with other people. This doesn’t inherently mean to stop being passionate. What we’ve seen in history this year, and what we have learned about our American heritage, is that reasonable people do not make progress. It is the unreasonable people who do. It is people who believe so fervently in an idea that they are willing to sacrifice that which they only truly possess, their life, so that others make experience it as well. Those people were our Founding Fathers, signing the Declaration of Independance. Those people were our grandparents who fought in the world wars, fighting to make the world safe for democracy and our ideals of freedom, and equality. Those people were the Freedom Fighters, such as MLK and Malcolm X who though they believed in different ways to achieve a common goal, they still believed in one common goal. These people realized they were living under gravity, be that a tyrant king, the rise of a dangerous foe, or racial discrimination. These people defied their own gravities, and made positive, forward progress in their world while doing so. These people were like us, once, us with our ideas and our speeches, our beliefs, and our blogs. In the America that we will grow old in, I want us to defy our own gravities, or die trying, because we truly do deserve to fly.

Lastly, I would like to say thank you for a wonderful year full of intellectual thought and development, and for making the American Experience everything it was said to be. It’s been a heck of a year. "Non scholae discimus sed vitae". “We did not learn for school, but for life”.

=Cite Your Sources=