Re: Help editing down speech for rally?

I've cut it down some here; see if it might fit into five minutes now, and if not, cut out a few sentences within each paragraph. Yeah, I just got into town yesterday. We're going to Union Pool, a large bar in Williamsburg, tonight; give me a ring.

On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 1:35 PM, Seb Gillen <sebgillen@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey Barrett,

So I was just talking to John Penley, and he said that we only have an
hour for all the speakers. As it stands, my speech is at least 15
minutes, and John recommended that I send it to you for some help
editing it down. Here it is:

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.

When I was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma, there were more than twenty
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 little siblings-in-arms...they never got a chance to go out and
live.

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 easily
dismissing it once it takes hold. But it taught me that I couldnt let
fear be my ruler. It taught me that even when I am most deadly afraid,
and in fact then most of all, I must not falter and I must forge
ahead. We cannot be afraid of information. We must face the truth,
easy and hard, because to do anything else is to deny reality and bury
our heads in the sand.

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.

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.

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. How
could it be anything but? We live in exponential times. 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. 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 brilliant tomorrow, we the people, we the
users, we the free.

We live in exponential times, 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 guide 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 where the government
can keep a closer eye on the People than the People can keep on the
government?

Or is it a future where the grand possibilities of cooperation have
been recognized and the untold bounties of our combined efforts
realized?

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.

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.

And so 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.

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. I ask you 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. But never neglect your senses
of humor, wonder, and curiosity, for they will see your spirit safely
through the darkest of days.

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.

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.

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 that the Grand Experiment of America has
already failed beyond salvage.

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
succeeding, 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.

Before he was arrested, Bradley Manning said, "i want people to see
the truth regardless of who they are ... because without information,
you cannot make informed decisions as a public. All relationships,
including that that exists between the People and their government,
are built upon trust, and trust is built upon honesty; telling the
truth. Manning faces serious punishment for leaking the truth, but
countless men and women in Congress face no time for their corrupt
hypocrisy and bold faced lies. Those who disagree with Bradleys
actions are perhaps not entirely without justification, for I cannot
speak to whether or not his actions put any of our soldiers at risk.
But I can speak to the fact that our governments treatment of Bradley
is entirely without justification, because there is no justification
for subjecting a prisoner to such inhumane conditions. For such an
action not only truly does put our soliders at risk-- for how will our
enemies expect us treat them if they surrender when we treat even our
own citizens so harshly?-- but also risks the moral soul of our
nation. America is supposed to be the leader of the free world. Its
time we started acting like it.

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.

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

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

Thanks,

Seb

PS. Are you still planning on being in NY for the event?

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302