Even Professional Football Players Can Speak Eloquently

I’ve always strived to speak intelligently and clearly in life.

As a teacher and mentor to a good number of students, I try to provide many resources and examples of how to attain such a standard.

Today, I am reminded that even atheletes who put their mind to it can achieve the same.  As students, you should also reach for the same goals.  Whether you achieve it today or tomorrow or maybe years from now, it’s always the “gold standard” which you should seek.

Before going into the Superbowl, my hometown Seattle Seahawks have winning on their mind.  Their running back though has instead “privacy” on his and has delivered an amazing speech that was 15 minutes short of an hour on the topic.  Check it out:

“While increasingly exhaustive access to media has delivered many benefits to the American way of life, this same heightened scrutiny has simultaneously imposed progressively greater obstacles to our personal privacy, thus presenting ethical challenges unique to the internet age,”

said the five-time Pro Bowler, calmly strolling back and forth with a microphone in hand while making eye contact with each individual member of the assembled national sports media.

“Privacy versus accessibility; secrecy versus convenience; the individual versus the greater virtual communities of the digital landscape. At first blush, these appear to be the fundamental poles around which the modern privacy debate circles, but they have only grown more multifaceted and complex as the technological paradigm perpetually shifts. When meditating on the give-and-take of ever-evolving technology, I am often reminded of a quote from George Orwell: ‘Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.’

Could it be, in perhaps the ultimate irony, that with every technological advancement, with every marvel of engineering that seemingly brings us closer together and rips down the very walls that once divided the world, that with every such step forward, we have become ever more guarded about our own personal boundaries and the information we are comfortable sharing with one another? And in doing so, do we in fact chip away at the very core of what makes for a civilized society, and in an even broader sense, the very notion of being human?

For to be human is inherently to be social, and yet it is also to desire control. With the public domain seemingly encompassing a greater and greater volume of personal information, that control has been ceded.

The so-called right to privacy, as it were, is no longer a right inasmuch as it is now a privilege, to be enjoyed until it is torn away at a moment’s notice. Conversely, we so often desire to break down that same right to privacy of our fellow human beings, shielding ourselves while exposing others, just as a snake devours its own tail.

Perhaps the biggest question of all is whether privacy itself—at least in the traditional sense—even exists in today’s world, or if it is simply a relic of a past time that bears no more meaning or significance than Aristotelian physics or the idea of a geocentric universe. Simple answers to such queries do not exist, I’m afraid, but in exploring them, we can at the very least hold a mirror to society and possibly even to ourselves—and that is something I hope to accomplish with all of you here today.”

Ha!  Gotcha! 

The Importance of Being Able to Think Critically

Seriously, as a teacher and mentor to many, I have an obligation to do my best to help my students realize what is fact and what is parody.  Rather, there is “fact” or information that is closer to being information we can all accept as true or legitimate and there are many other forms of information that we must question: thus, “critical thinking.”

In school, I was taught about “primary sources” vs. “secondary sources” and many years later, I’ve found that there are even many more sources along with sometimes other forms of “rhetoric” that doesn’t even aim to be true.  The above is “satire.

The piece was delivered by the Onion and if you know what the Onion is, you will realize it’s “an American digital media company and news satire organization. It runs an entertainment website featuring satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news. It also runs a non-satirical entertainment section known as The A.V. Club. Since 2007, the organization has published satirical news audio and video online, as the ‘Onion News Network’.”

Frankly, I was trying to find something a friend posted and I landed on this on my Facebook newsfeed:

Obviously, the information there is more “social” and isn’t meant to be on he front page of the New York Times.  However, there are many “shares” that people post to provide their “friends” information they think would be useful in their lives.  For example this post which might shed light on past abuse towards Native Americans.

However, these days, information is rampant and the ability to gauge the veracity of the information you read regularly is critical.  I simply saw the following and clicked on it because I thought it was odd that the professional athelete would deliver such a treatise:

If I failed to see it was the Onion and simply just read it and moved on, I would of looked like a fool sharing it with others or even acting as if the running back was more eloquent than he truly is.  And frankly, there’s many instances where any student growing up could easily misattribute a source and do something like use it in a report at school.

Can you imagine if people are out there constantly citing inaccurate information?  Do you now realize how important it is to be able to sift through the information that is published constantly by unknown figures? Do you also see how sometimes rhetoric can be so persuasive even if the source is not considered normally credible?

It’s definitely more important to filter quality sources from the many others.  Also, it’s critical as well to be paying attention to sources of information especially when your senses tell you otherwise.

We hope we can share these important teachings to your children.  Let’s talk about these many issues here at HK’s Top Debate Center.