Thursday Take-Off: Where is your voice?

 

Empowerment. It’s a word that is thrown around a lot (and for good reason). But I sometimes ponder whether we truly know the definition, scope, and ultimately the power of empowerment. Empowerment is not just a platform for opportunity or a state of being. It is a continuously cultivated and active process. What drives me to embrace and comprehend my own sense of empowerment is this journey towards discovering this voice that is awakened by empowerment.

What is empowerment if it is not manifested in a voice? In speech? In art? In opinions?

So as I struggle with my own voice, who I am, what impact I want to leave on the world, I challenge you to search for your own. This question is less about what your own voice is, but rather where your voice is revealed. Today, I am less concerned with solidifying what I stand for in an effort to understand in what space I can share these most personal thoughts.

So I ask, is your voice, your sense of empowerment, reflected in:

 

a bout of spoken word

an unfathomable confrontation with a close friend

a jotted down note on a napkin

a loud burst of political jargon

or just

a single quiet voice trying to make a difference in a day to day conversation

 

Let’s keep searching…

 

Post Submitted By: Ashton

Free Speech Fridays: Ellen DeGeneres- Commencement Speech 2009

In her commencement speech to the graduating class of Tulane University Class of 2009, Ellen DeGeneres shares her experiences that have made her into the confident and free spirited person she is today. She emphasizes the importance of being true to yourself and not letting anyone else dictate what is important to you. Her manner of speaking throughout the speech proves how comfortable she is within her own skin, and she exudes this natural confidence that is a result of the struggles she had experienced and overcome. As a college undergraduate student, I am still in the process of discovering who I am and learning to love the different facets of myself that I discover. Ellen’s speech touched me deeply because of the fact that she risked everything she had worked for in order to be true to herself. She admitted to having lost everything in one point of her life, but she can now live her life being honest with herself and those around her. This inspirational and hilarious speech invokes a sense of purpose and strikes a cord for the rest of us who are still on that path of discovering who we are. Take a look at her amazing speech (even if just for the pure hilarity Ellen creates) and write your comments below!

Post submitted by Lauren Park

Thursday Take-Off: If you could make a 30 second speech to the entire world, what would you say?

There are 7.046 billion people living on Earth today. If you had 30 seconds to say whatever you wanted to every single one of them, what would you say?

It is no secret that in today’s day and age we,  as a global society,  are connected more than ever. With so many opinions circulating, so many viewpoints being expressed, it is nearly impossible not to experience information fatigue and to tune out a lot of the daily opinions that are being thrown around in every arena of life. But, if you could be sure that every person on the planet was listening, you would have the ability to really make your voice heard, to make a change, to touch people’s lives, and express what is truly important to you.

For me, I would speak of love. For I believe that love is the foundation of all greatness. Also, I would speak on the importance of perseverance, because those who emerge from the darkest of places often look the most exquisite in the light.

Written by: Ashley Bennett

Lee’s Speech: “Humans are hardwired to empathize with others”

Imagine you are going back to your high school and giving the students a speech about life, academics, success, hardship, identity and/or the pursuit of happiness. What would you tell them?

 

I come from a small, somewhat isolated town.  When I was in high school, I was closeted, sheltered, and, in many senses, pre-conscious to where I am in life now.  My outlet in those days was storytelling, which become a way of connecting to others and re-envisioning my life as it might be — stories became a place of exchange and representation, as well as realization of myself and others through the liberating lens of ‘fiction.’  Long before I came out, I wrote stories about queer individuals, displaying my own internal (and somewhat unconscious) concept of self, as opposed to the very bland one my overlarge Old Navy jackets, bursting backpack, and quantum physics-related shirts broadcasted (although these certainly told a part of my personality).  At the same time, working for my school newspaper, I began talking to people in my school’s community whom I likely would never have come into contact with ordinarily in my AP classes or extracurriculars — people whose appearance very simply stated “jock,” “gangster,” “cheerleader,” and many other of the cliched labels that abound in high school.  In talking to them in an interview format — in which they were encouraged to share their own stories — I came to learn things about them that I never would have if I had simply judged them by appearance or talked to them in a more social situation.  This is about when I learned that everyone has something interesting about them, some interesting experience or story to tell, and, thus, incredible value.

This probably sounds like an anticlimactic epiphany, but its implications are far reaching.  How many times have you encountered someone of whom you’ve thought, “I don’t care for them,” or “I could never live as they do,” or any other type of judgment?  Next time you think one such thought about a person, though, consider that they aren’t just the external image, the outward actor, that you encounter.  They are a multi-dimension, deeply internal person, just as you are.  They have the same constant rush of thoughts that runs about in your mind. They have the same emotional valences.  They have the same buried broken spots. Everybody does.  Which is simply spectacular.

A useful metaphor here is of life as a tapestry, one which W. Somerset Maugham elaborates in his novel Of Human Bondage:

As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if one was forced to believe that his actions were outside his choosing, so might a man look at his life, that it made a pattern… Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, or beautiful… Whatever happened to him now would be one more motive to add to the complexity of the pattern, and when the end approached he would rejoice in its completion. It would be a work of art, and it would be none the less beautiful because he alone knew of its existence, and with his death it would at once cease to be.

Narrative, life crafted into art, thus becomes of immense use and immense power.  It becomes a way of relating to people, of viewing and exploring the cast richness of existence and the world that we occupy but too often glance over with disinterested eye.  It also becomes a way of aligning communities not along divisive labels or difference, like religion, class, race, sexual orientation, etc., but along structural similarities, upon immediate experience, which can cross such boundaries, is never exclusive to a certain group.  In this way, narrative can help us become more empathetic individuals with fewer conflicts.

Moreover, this isn’t just nice philosophizing; there’s a new field of neuroscience which is finding that humans are hardwired to empathize with others, and that the uniquely human capacity for narrative aids us in doing this.  As science writer Jeremy Rifkin summarizes:

We are strange creatures. We can put our meaning above our survival. There is no dividing line between what one is and what one ought to be. To our knowledge, we are unique among the animal species in that we are the only ones who tell stories. We live by narrative. Concepts like the past, present, future and the resolution of conflict are all introduced to the child by way of narrative. Narrative is critical to transforming empathic distress to empathic engagement. We are each a composite of the stories we tell about ourselves and the stories others tell about us.

Thus, I leave you all with the questions:  What will your story be?  What pattern will it take?  Who will you share it with?  Whose will you listen to and observe for its own singular artisanry?

By Lee.

Free Speech Fridays: Irvine 11 speaks at UCLA

A few weeks ago, the Community Programs Office at UCLA hosted a welcome event for the upcoming 2011-2012 academic year. One of the speakers was a member of the Irvine 11. Even though I wasn’t well versed on the incident that occurred, the speaker that presented was amazing. If you have some time, take a few moments and research about the Irvine 11. What are your thoughts on the issue?

 

Post submitted by Lauren

Free Speech Fridays: Speak with Conviction

In honor of WSP’s current development pieces about communicating successfully, I chose this spoken word poem by Taylor Mali. I have listened to this particular speech many times, and I regard it as one of the most refreshing pieces about public speaking. Mali questions the use of phrases such as “like” and “you know” that seem to be widespread in our current generation. How many times have we had a conversation with someone where these phrases were used?

The goal of conversations, or any form of communication, is to get your message across to the other person. You want other people to believe what you are saying, and in order to do so, you need to speak with conviction. Avoid using “like”, “you know”, “umm”, and other interjections that don’t add to your point.

As Mali puts it, “It is simply not enough these days to question authority. You have to speak with it, too.”

Post by: Miqi Cos

Free Speech Fridays: “On the Mindless Menace of Violence”

“Some looks for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.  For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay…  This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.”

Robert F. Kennedy delivered this speech on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King’s assassination, and it remains resonant today.  He touches on issues of community formation along commonalities (suffering, empathy, the universal human condition) as opposed to differences (race, class, ideology).  Aside from exhibiting some of the most beautifully constructed rhetoric of any 20th century speech, Kennedy’s speech is notable for its steady, firm, slow-paced intensity, which perfectly suited the solemn occasion for which it was delivered.  If you’re like me and want to pause on certain phrases/ideas, here’s the full text of the speech.

Posted by Lee.

Free Speech Friday: Sarah Palin and her Hypeman

Although I’m not sure why Sarah Palin takes the time to tell us so much about her husband during this speech, I was especially intrigued by the beginning of her speech. John McCain circles the stage and waves to adoring fans. To be honest, if I were him, I’d do the same. Even if the audience isn’t necessarily there to hear me deliver a speech, they’ll still clap for me? I’ll take it!  I love that from rappers to politicians, the “hypeman” element effectively changes the landscape of speeches. With John McCain behind Sarah Palin, Diddy behind Biggie, and Yuri Kohiyama behind Malcolm X onstage it often seems that although the mouth that the speech comes from is the main focus, it doesn’t hurt to have your number one fan standing behind you. Who’s job is cooler, the speech-giver or the hypeman?

 

 

Posted by: Tiffany

Free Speech Fridays: Maps

All jokes aside (I know, it’s hard to move past the jokes), the question makes me think about how I’d answer.  For five years, I’ve tutored brilliant and beautiful children. It was through them that I became fascinated with maps. One of my students remembered all fifty-one United States state capitals for fun. My partner knows the capital of every country in the world. I was always impressed by this for some reason. There seems some power in knowing the most politically powerful epicenters in various regions.

One of my favorite lines from M.I.A is “I put people on the map who’ve never seen a map.” I used to think of myself as doing the same thing because I’m putting the Philippines on the map in a new way.  I’m going to bring fame to my motherland by being a positive representation of our culture even though many children in the barangays of the Philippines will never see a map because their community is plagued by poverty and poor education.

What does Miss South Carolina’s question or answer make you think about?

Posted by: Tiffany

Free Speech Fridays: J.K. Rowling and The Power of the Imagination

A 3-Parter, but definitely worth the watch.  J.K. Rowling’s speech to the graduating class of Harvard University.  Her speech is humorous, moving, and inspirational.  A must listen for anyone, especially those entering the world beyond graduation.  J.K. Rowling reminds us about the power of the imagination.

Post Submitted By: Layhannara Tep

Free Speech Friday: Obama’s Speech on Race

March 18, 2008

A moving and historic speech by President Barack Obama on the subject of race.  It was delivered during his presidential campaign in Philadelphia.  Please take the time to listen and reflect.  This isn’t a speech about politics; it’s much more than that.

 

Full video and transcript.

Post submitted by Crystal Maranan