a speech competition - quotes and descriptions to inspire creative writing

The thing is, people's heads are similar to those old vinyl records... they have an A side and a B side, sorta. For the healthy mind, side A is the higher social mind and their B track is their primitive survival mind. For trauma brains, the kind most folks around here have, it's the opposite. So when you get up there to talk, you gotta enhance their higher social minds by talking about empathy, love, caring... and be sure to soothe their primitive minds. And that is the right thing to do. Everyone wants to be able to think free of their fears, otherwise the primitive mind starts steering, dominating, reducing empathy and creativity. So think of this as good manners to talk this way, let's keep one another with the right part of our brains in control.

Before the speech competition began a middle aged woman bustled to the stand. We all took a collective moment to yawn and brace ourselves against some words to inspire us to work harder. She looked about as inspiring as my geography teacher, and she gave up the will to try a long time ago. But when she spoke every word was written in fire.

"I realise that in this room there are vastly more teens than people my age and older, but if you'll excuse me dear teens, I'm speaking to the adults. You are cretins. All of you. You bring these kids here to talk about problems they didn't create without telling them that there is an easy solution to all of it. This doesn't empower them, it creates anxiety. You bring them here and put them on stage, telling them that their generation will change the world, save the world. They can't. They can't but you can. You can and I'll tell you how.

You have money and that is all the corporations care about. Money. Fake digits. Change the way you spend and you change the world. Make boring changes, don't buy anything you don't need unless a local artisan made it. Cook from scratch with local produce as much as possible. Take your money out of a big five bank and take it to an ethical local credit union. Learn how to convert your household to zero waste. None of this is difficult, and even if it was - the entire planet, your kids included, depend on you doing it.

There is enough food on this planet for nine billion people. There is no shortage of food. We could grow enough food for four billion alone in southern Sudan. Stop supporting the food giants, they make you sick with addictive high sugar, high fat, high salt products that can't even sustain lab rats and they don't care so long as sales stay high. The foods are laced with chemicals - preservatives, colourings, flavourings, carcinogens. They don't care if we get sick, so long as they get rich.

The world population could fit comfortably into Texas, there is no over population...