Remember that common advice helpful supporters consistently offered during Speech classes? Everyone knows speakers who feel intimidated by their audience should picture their listeners naked or in their underwear, whichever. Conjuring such an image supposedly empowers performers and instills in each a sense of power and control. The clothed speaker feels an advantage because his or her audience presents a harmless and defenseless siege. Yeah, as exact and descriptive as that is, the image never worked for me. Naked people are certainly not helpless.
Look at the Vikings and their hirsute berserkers, for Christ’s sake. If anything, people who are walking around naked in this Modern Age are demonstrably crazy. When any naked people are encountered in public, as seen on police-reality TV shows, they can be and often are dangerous. So, that idea of confronting a mob of mad naked people undermines the whole exercise in anxiety reduction. Besides, what are a bunch naked people doing in a high school Speech class? Why are they naked?
Are these people suffering some mass delirium? Are they undead zombies whose clothes had become tattered and torn off? In either case, the situation is obviously dangerous and no place someone should be talking about an assigned topic. These people might be part of a cult, or something. If that was the case, I doubt they would have any interest in the boring crap I have to say. I imagine they have more nefarious and terminal plans and I should be running.
And these nude cultists, what are they planning? Rape? Okay, that is paranoid – though reasonable, given the circumstance. Filtered through questionable decency, do these naked people want consensual sex? That is just not appropriate in a high school class. I think the teacher or principle should be arrested for instigating this base scenario. This scandal is unforgivable.
Unforgivable in this backward Modern Age when abstinence-only sex education is being forced upon schools by politicians. Paranoid again, this seems a plot, and whomever currently holds the reigns of political power in this nation is the blame. Our protection-less, education-lacking teens seemingly become pawns, spilling more penniless slave-class drones into this world – each generation more ignorant and virile and certainly not sterile. And they are brainwashed and they are told – school is dull and is unnecessary, and drinking is fun and inexpensive and theft is cool, and f**king and serving masters with money are the path to divinity in this life.
All these thoughts don’t help me communicate my message. For the most part, I think people should keep their clothes on. At the same time, if schools are not speaking about birth control then students should give speeches about the options in their classes. Teens, as schools continue to fail, teaching yourselves and each other amount to your guaranteed education. Follow your interest and don’t quit. It gets better in the sense practice and knowledge amount to one’s true advantages.
