Lesson 47: My Political Rhetoric

Aren't politics fun?

In tenth grade, with two years of experience as Class Historian, I ran for a third term. For whatever reason, my fear of public speaking kicked in at this point, and my speech went something like this ...

"Hi. I'm Katherine. I don't like to give speeches, but I've been your Class Historian for the past two years. Please vote for me again. Thanks."

I didn't hang a single campaign sign.

I won.

Why?




Clearly, it wasn't my speech. My speech was terrible! My speech gave absolutely no indication as to the way I had fulfilled my Class Historian duties in the previous two terms.

Interestingly, I was a really good historian.

In eighth grade, I made a scrapbook for our class. It included the scores of every single soccer, field hockey, and basketball game, as well as the highlights from every track meet entered into by Linglestown Junior High in the school year of 2007-08. It had pictures from most of the school dances. It painstakingly chronicles our school's efforts in raising money for the Four Diamonds Fund. Also,  it covers a variety of "crowds." "Crowds" were big in junior high.

I worked all summer on it. Hopefully, it still resides in the library of LJHS. Our memories live on. My work as a Class Historian encapsulated our story.

Did my tenth grade speech reflect any of this?

Words are powerful. We all know this.

And yet, people are phenomenal at twisting, distorting, sound-biting, manipulating words.

The point of this post: I am so bored by facebook links to political articles that quote this and that speech of either candidate and comment on it ... as if this speech or their comments are the last word on a matter.

All of these words are tainted.

Let's not give them credibility by recirculating them.


Lesson Learned: Not everything is worth our time to read.