congrats, alex

our only obligation as americans is to protect ourselves from the government
no way am i voting next year. i figure we're fucked left right and sideways whoever ends up elected as the "leader" of our country. no one leads me! no one!

hey, congratulations. so what did you ended up talking about?

question #2 is what are you gonna do w/ the prize money? xiu xiu tickets + cab fare?


except for satan, right?

I ended up speaking about how we are obligated to use our rights to protect our rights, to preserve the constitution when our leaders fail to do so, and how we all have the power to contribute to a "more perfect union." I made fun of Hilary, and tried to make as many anti-democrat bits as possible because the American Legion people are a bunch of old Republican Libertarian veterans and a few "I love my country"s.

It worked out pretty well.

I don't know what I'm going to do with the money yet. Xiu Xiu tickets plus transportation sounds pretty dandy...

I don't owe the gov't shit.

I owe it to myself to stand up for the constitution though.

citizens ARE the government.
the government is US.

Our obligations are to vote in representatives that we want, based on full knowledge of the issues at hand and what issues are important to the individual voter.
also, we are obliged to go along with the decisions made by our duly electe officials, and if we do not like those decisions, we are obliged to vite those fuckos out of office.
We are obliged to keep an eye on government, to be vigilant for corruptioopn, falsehoods, lies, and manipulations.
we are obliged to pay our taxes for thopse taxes are used by the government to pay for building and maintaining our national infrastructure, from roads, to brideges to schools to fire departments and police departments and public hospitals etc.

Yes, yes...congratulations and glad to be of some help, young citizen.

We all have a duty to not be uninformed, apathetic and dispassionate.

And the words and legacy of our greatest presidents, Jefferson and Lincoln, serve to constantly remind us of this.

Many (sadly not enough, but many) Republicans nowadays display that they are fed up with the current state of their party and are going back to great Republican leaders like Eisenhower and Lincoln for inspiration.

Part of my speech:

"Many of my peers told me, we didn't owe the government anything. "They owe us!" Though to be fair, many of my peers are a bunch of wanna be anarchist punks who'd rather have no government at all..."Thanks again for those quotes. It worked out quite nicely.

You made some brave choices with your subject matter and it actually paid off. Wow, it's stirring up some faith in humanity on my end.

I won a contest in tenth or eleventh grade, I can't remember which. The theme was "Letters for World Peace" in which we wrote letters to Mikhail Gorbachev who was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the then Soviet Union at the time. I've written about it before when tooting my horn. It was an essay we had to write during two class periods and I had to give the speech in front of a very stodgy, mostly Republican Rotary Club. The whole thing got printed up in the local paper.

There is this Rotary competition coming up in February, and only 3 people can go. I have to write up a summary and then the three best will be chosen. It can be on anything though. ANYTHING. Which is cool, but also kind of challenging.

I'm thinking of writing about how fucking lame 9/11 conspiracy theories are, and how conspiracy theories, regardless of how true or false they are, are counterproductive and distract from the issues at hand.