Re: latest speech revision

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 1:40 AM, Seb Gillen <sebgillen@gmail.com> wrote:

hey man...I'm not sure what the latest version of my speech you've seen is, but check this out, it's pretty solid:

My name is Sebastian Gillen. Two months before my ninth birthday, I was diagnosed with Stage IV Neuroblastoma, a rare and highly malignant cancer of the autonomic nervous system. I had a tumor the size of a football in my abdomen, ganglia wrapped around my little fourth-graders heart, and metastasis in my bone marrow. My doctor told my mom that I had two weeks to live. More than ten years later, Im still here.
So if anything I am to propose seems impossible, dont worry, you dont need to tell me-- Ive heard it before.

Spending so much time around death did nothing to cure me of fear. What it did do, however, was teach me. It didnt teach me how to prevent fear and it didnt teach me a foolproof way of overcoming once it got in my way. But it taught me that I couldnt let fear be my ruler.
When I was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma, there were about thirty other kids being treated with me. Today, only one other boy is left. All of those kids, those kids who were my friends, my surrogates, and my siblings-in-arms...they never got a chance to go out and live.

Im still afraid of so many things. Im afraid of growing up, Im afraid of never growing up, Im afraid that tomorrow will be worse than today, Im afraid of not making a difference--the list could eat up a few more pages yet. But what Im afraid of more than anything, though, is not doing those kids justice. Im lucky enough that I dont have to fight for my life anymore, but you can be damn sure that Im gonna keep fighting for theirs, and the lives of those like them. Im going to fight for them, because they cant fight for themselves. Im going to fight for them, because Im one of the lucky ones-- Im one of the lucky ones, born with access to health care, to higher education and free information, to clean water and plentiful food. Im one of the lucky ones, with two hands and a voice and a bill full of rights, and Im gonna use them. The children of tomorrow deserve freedom, freedom from injustice, from disease, from hunger, from war...and in order to secure these freedoms for them, we must first secure the freedom of information.
I remember the beautiful courage that was always in their eyes and their hearts, and hope swells in my chest with the thought that maybe we can make a difference, that when were done well look back and see an era of cruel barbarism gone by, and well look forward and see horizons bright beyond our greatest imaginings. Thats what makes me brave enough to do anything. I know that if we stand together, united in mind and purpose, we can save our children, the children of today and of countless unknown tomorrows. I do not need to hold my fear at bay with blind hope and desperate optimism, for I can conquer it with a certainty. We can cure the sick and clothe the cold, feed the hungry and educate the ignorant. We can do anything, if we set our minds to it and work together.
We put a man on the moon. We put a man on the moon, ten years from when we decided to do it. What could we do today, with all of our technology, with ten years of solid cooperation? What could we accomplish, if we were not afraid of ourselves, of each other, of the possibility of failure?
I dont know about you, but I think that we could save the world.

Because we are the ones the world has been waiting for.

We are the ones who will do the things that must be done, the things that shouldve been done a long time ago. We are the ones who have seen the light of reason and common sense, and have seen through the divisive, destructive selfishness of our elders.
We are not our parents. We are not those who came before us. The potential that lies ahead is unrivalled in human history. Potential for nearly unimaginable greatness, and potential for unfathomable carnage.

When I was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma, the survival rate was less than 10 percent. Today it is nearly 30 percent. If I had been born ten years earlier, I almost certainly would not have survived.
We live in an age that is absolutely full of wonder, an era of wild imaginings and everyday miracles, the Information Age. To those of us born into it; nothing could be clearer: information must be free. More than 10 years ago, the 1.4 ton supercomputer Deep Blue beat Grandmaster Gary Kasparov at chess. Today, we can fit the processing power of that 1.4 ton supercomputer onto a chip the size of your thumbnail. In 2010, 1.8 billion people were connected to the Internet--roughly the same amount of humans living on the planet in the 1920s. In 1968, one transistor cost one dollar. In 2010, one dollar could purchase 50 million transistors. We live in exponential times. In 2002, digital storage capacity overtook analogue capacity, and we entered the Digital Age. As of 2007 almost 94 percent of our memory is in digital form.
Now, the Digital Reformation is coming, and we will be its makers, the new vanguard of humanitys bright tomorrow, we the people, we the users, we the free.

And so the efforts we make today will be magnified unimaginable through ten hundred thousand tomorrows-- so too will our failures, but none will reverberate with more chilling effect than a failure to try. I fear that our country is being walked on the edge of fates razor, and precious little attention is being paid to where our steps will lead us. We must take heed of the signs surrounding us, and we must endeavour to look forward and to consider our actions with the daring wisdom of those faced with a difficult path and precious few alternatives.
In the days to come, we will stand at the crossroads of the infinite, a tipping point, one of those precious few moments in the vast stretches of humanitys history where the actions of a dedicated few can dictate the course of all mankind.

So we must take a moment to ask ourselves an important question: what is the future we want to live in?

Is it a future divided and bloodied by endless strife, fueled by willful ignorance and petty disagreement? Is it a future dominated by dizzying new heights of thoughtless greed and unthinking self-absorption, a future of zero sum, where the gain of one man must be taken as the loss of another? Is it a future where the unrestrained freedom of the few is bought at the cost of the liberty of the many and where the happenstances of birth, the chaotic lottery of genetics and lineage and class and geography, shall determine the worth and the course of a childs life?
Or is it a future where the grand possibilities of cooperation have been recognized and the untold bounties of our combined efforts realized? Is it a future where those in need are given the help they need, the endless varieties of help that we all sometimes need in order to be able to help ourselves? Is it a future full of compassion and brotherhood, where the first thought is not whose fault is this?, but rather, how can we make it better? Is it a future where we give all people our respect, not because of the luck of their birth or even just for great deeds they have accomplished, but simply because they are human beings and they deserve it? Is it a future where we strive to be our best and to accomplish humanitys impossible dreams, or where we merely grasp in vain at what seems best for ourselves?
I know what future I want, and I know that I am prepared to shed my sweat as well as my blood to bring it about.

So, I suppose that actually leaves us with two very important questions.

What is the future we want to live in?

And how hard are we willing to fight for it?

Many of us have become jaded and cynical, and not without justification. Our countrymen have already been a great disappointment. They have greedily shirked their humane duties, betrayed the proud pasts of their ancestors and the bright hopes of our children in exchange for an ugly train of fleeting indulgences...but that is absolutely no reason for us to give in to the gilded temptations of anger and fear and blame. It must rather serve to drive us to redouble our efforts, to do everything that we can, everything and even more, because we have learned that if we do not stand and rise to the brutal challenges that lay before us... no one will stand in our place.

We need you now, and we need the best of you. We need your foolhardy courage and your unwavering dedication to a good cause, your brave individuality and generous nature, your hunger for challenge and innovation and your passion for a good days work.
We need the light that burns within you. Because it is not too late--if we try, we can save our selves, our future, and our world. But we must try. And if we do not try...then we deserve whatever ill fates befall us.
We need you to take a stand with us, not only because the reward is far more than worth it-- for what could be worth more than a free tomorrow?--but because the alternative, to sit still and take no conscious risk, to make a choice by making none at all, is to risk one of the most dreadful fates there is. It is to risk the paralysis of cowardice and a slow, debilitating murder for your mind at the hands of fear and doubt.
So I ask you with the utmost earnesty: cast aside your cynicism and scorn, open yourself up, let your old wounds be healed and let all misdeeds be forgiven. I ask you to cut through the numbing chains of apathy and ambivalence, dismiss the needy petulance of outrage and entitlement, pierce the beguiling veil of easy entertainment and discard the high mantle of righteous indignation, cast aside the shallow pleasures of consumerism and set yourself free from the unquenchable fires of revenge and hatred, let them burn out and allow yourself to grow mighty from the ashes.
I ask you to make the effort to reach out to each other, to help, to understand. I ask you to distrust the promises of the powerful and discredit the hateful hypocrites who clog the airwaves. I ask you to take your own deep drink of liberty, for it is still yours to take. And that is the good news for today: it is yours to take, it is still yours and no one elses. The bad news is that no one can do it for you; to be truly free you must free yourself. So take a deep drink, and spit it in the faces of those who try to stop you.
Finally, I ask you to turn your back on fear, to look away, for a moment, from how and why things might go wrong, and instead to focus on the wonders that lie within our grasp. An answer to the energy crisis. Access to clean water for every human. An end to world hunger. A truly global network of free information that could connect and unite all of humanity. Men and women on the surface of another world. These are things that we can see accomplished in our lifetimes, if we do the right things now. Let us focus on doing the right things today for the best tomorrow, because tomorrow begins today.

Do you feel it? That electrifying potential running down your spine and over your arms, that shivering power tells you that if you would only just attempt it, if you would stand up, straighten your back, and speak your heart, others would stand with you. You could make the slightest difference, which is all the difference, and you could reshape the future of humanity. If you help, we may find that, contrary to all popular belief, mans best days still lie ahead in the uncharted darkness.
But we need your light to help us see the way.

Together, united, man may yet live. But divided, our efforts shall surely falter, and we shall surely die, and all our grandest aspirations will perish with us. Not likely today or tomorrow, perhaps not even on a day that you or I live to see, but harbor no doubt in your heart or your brain or your gut, if we do not realize that our greatest strength is each other -- all of us, together-- if we do not learn to see past our superficial differences of religious dogma and social more and recognize our vast commonality--recognize the fact that when it comes down to it, we are all the same, we are all human--if we cannot shatter the chain of our history, atrocity after bloody atrocity linked in horrible, unbroken succession...if we cannot do these things, then mankind is surely doomed. And the wondrous world that we have created will collapse under its own mighty weight, and it will burn, and it will engulf all humanity in its terrible funeral pyre. If we do not grow up, as individuals, as a culture, as a species....we will destroy all that our forefathers and foremothers fought for, all that they built, and our progeny will suffer among the smoldering ruins of mankinds brilliant yesterdays.
There will be naysayers, those who think that what we intend cannot be accomplished and that great men and women only lived in the history books, those who think that we no longer live in an age of legends and heroes, those of little hope and little faith and little minds. Those who doubt the potential in the fundamental goodness of the human spirit and our universal quiescent greatness, who see their own darkness cast upon the face of the world and think they prove the inevitability of the coming night, confusing their willful short-sightedness for a triumph of cold realism and steady logic and not realizing that all their shadows do is prove the existence of the light. Those who think the Grand Experiment of America has already failed.
Do we take their word for it? Is the task that lies before us so great that we should stop struggling, that we should give in and surrender? Is the spirit of hope so long dead that nothing can be done? Do we truly stand facing the impossible?
In my short time on this Earth, I have learned that the most important thing that one must remember about naysayers is that, despite what they would have you believe, they are not always right.
If they say we will be failures, for trying the impossible and not suceeding, then I say they will be fools, for calling a thing impossible and living to see it accomplished. If they say the odds are against us, I say never tell me the odds. The odds underestimate how much of a fight we can put up.
So in answer to those who criticize and cower, I say: if we cannot find a way, we will make our own.

We have a chance to start proving those who doubt us wrong---and I say we take it.

In the end, it will be the truth that sets us free, so what we must do first is make sure that the truth is heard.

We must speak up for the good and against the bad, speak from our hearts and speak those precious, powerful truths which we cannot deny, speak them and write them and post them, plaster them to the concrete and paint them on the glass, nail them to the doors of the churches and the mosques and the synagogues, sing them in the streets and the bars and the parks, yell them all from the rooftops and chant them on the steps of city hall. Fill the world so full of truth that it can no longer be ignored, so that it touches the insulated and moves the reluctant, so that it echoes in the ears of the deaf and is seared in the sight of the blinded.

May Lady Liberty guide our actions and Lady Luck smile upon them.

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Seb

PS. I've got a videographer friend coming to record the rally, hopefully he'll be able to put together something useful!