Warning: This is a 2am post.
Today, we had a motivational assembly at school in honor of February being black history month. Keith Hawkins came in as a guest speaker, and he seems pretty cool and funny, I guess, but a lot of his words weren't really hitting it for me.
The two big things that most students probably remembered from the assembly were "It's not about the IQ, it's about the I Will." and "The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement." Makes sense, since those two were the catchiest things he said.
I think part of why I wasn't really affected by his speech was because of his speaking style. It's always nice hearing someone speak in a relaxed, informal way. However, his delivery kind of smothered some of the message in my opinion. I'm not sure if it was only me or if others also felt that way, though.
He touches upon a lot of things, although I wish he went into more details on some things more than other things. He touched upon the fact that, even if doing drugs is bad, we shouldn't look down upon people who use drugs, and that people can fall and get back up. However, he didn't really go into detail on that part, which I felt was a shame. I feel like nowadays, with society pushing the idea that the top is where we want to be, we're starting to see the bottom in a really harsh light. And that upsets me, because I want to believe that, despite the fact that I've fallen, I can climb back up again. I'm not entirely worthless despite being at the bottom currently.
A good portion of the speech was spent on the fact that we are all family and we should all love each other. He stated, "I don't have to know you to love you." I wondered then if he should've gone over the different types of love, since I feel like people don't really understand that. When I say platonic love, a lot of people look at me like I've grown multiple heads. Of course we all need love. Does it have to be romantic love? Of course not. I've said that, I've said that if I have love from family and friends then everything is fine, and they tell me, "No! It's not the same!" Of course it's not the same. And it shouldn't. Maybe I don't want romantic love. Is that okay? Of course it is.
He stated that we should all love each other and a bunch of other warm fluffy junk along the same topic. And I kind of disagree with that. We shouldn't dislike based on stereotypes, race, skin color, whatever. However, there are still things that we dislike, such as twitchy legs or certain voice types that just rub us wrong. Are we allowed to have dislikes? I think so. Should we let it get in the way, turning into some kind of odd hate with no base? Uh, no. Hate is p.bad, but dislikes, in my opinion, are what makes us human.
However, he also pointed out that a lot of other mushy junk said by other speakers is also ineffective. I think my favorite part was, "Do you really want me to stand here and yell things like 'YEA! BE POSITIVE!' I think your teachers there would look at me like 'Be positive? Be positive?! What does that even mean?!'" He then went on a tangent about how "be positive" is not what's going to help us through school. We can't turn in blank sheets of paper and reply to the teacher with, "I was being positive!" He yelled out to end the tangent with, "But no really! What does 'BE POSITIVE' even mean?! Is that a blood type or something?!"
Anyways, it's 2 in the morning, this is all I remember, and I should be sleeping since I have a test first period tomorrow morning.
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