SAGE SCOTT: It is an absolute pleasure to be with you here tonight. It is an amazing pleasure, and I am a product of my environment. I grew up relatively privileged with creative autonomy and abundance of culture and the safety to explore. This educational sovereignty led me onto a path that I think we will all be familiar with, that of a blind gumption to save the world.
However, on this journey, being a naturally skeptical person, I rejected just about any narrative that I had not done extensive research on. My formative self would rail against anything in my 15- or 16-year-old mind that I did not completely comprehend. With this youthful optimism and a voracious appetite for knowledge, I set about learning the ethics of just about everything. And at my current age of 17, I can proudly say that I live my life in a way that does the most good for the most people.
I became a vegan. I drastically reduced my shopping habits, was a kinder friend, and became a more conscious and humane individual. I thought by extending my ethicism to not only include humans all around the world that I had never met, but even farm animals, I was doing right by my community and therefore, the greater world.
[LAUGHTER]
I thought I was just inches from being this paragon of world peace and holiness.
[LAUGHTER]
However, in all of my ethical holiness, it had never occurred to me that my humanity was not being extended to every human in my immediate community. I could learn through research about poverty and reject sweatshop labor. I could learn about the consciousness of animals and reject animal products from my diet. But in all of my research, I had never learned about the hearts, the minds, and the souls of my neighbor and rejected the idea that despite differing political views, that they too are a person with desires to be included and feel loved.
Striving for a higher level of ethicism landed me in places where me and my peers would often nod our heads in liberal contentment and agree on just about out everything. Fortunately, ethicism landed me in a place where learning took hard work as well as head work. It was contemporary issues of Facing History class, and Miss Mary McIntosh's transformative classroom. We learned about how decisions made hundreds of years ago by a select few can still impact society today.
Suspending judgment, we learned how to face difference with open minds and a greater understanding of history. For the first time in my life, I felt truly uncomfortable with conversation. I couldn't dominate them with facts or statistics. I had to truly listen to what other people were saying. I had to listen to learn and not to respond. Now, in this polarized world, this skill has been an absolute lifeline. I must admit that my sometimes overly analytical mind and skeptical nature still did not allow me to accept all of the truths of my immediate community.
In the beginning, to be honest, the entire model of conversation as a learning tool as well in healing practice felt very froufrou lala. I needed to prove. I needed to see the results were replicable outside of the sanctity of Miss Mary McIntosh's classroom. The perfect opportunity had been brewing all year. I had contemporary issues sixth period and enjoyed a meditative space of listening and creation of humane society.
However, all of that flew out the window somewhere in the bowels of Central High School by the time I got to seventh period. Wrongfully, I made decisions every day about whose stories mattered. My seventh period teacher was a man who I felt was my complete opposite-- traditional in his beliefs, outspoken in his republicanism, older, and white. Needless to say, I found him to be unrelatable. In passing, he made pro-gun and pro-NRA comments with other students.
And I was just waiting for the day that I could say, here, I typed an essay, 12-point MLA font, double-spaced about why you're so wrong, and I'm so right. Booyah! [LAUGHS] Streamers, the whole shebang. I would win the ethicism prize. Michelle Obama would give me a big old hug because I got someone to believe what I believed, because what I believed was right.
[LAUGHTER]
Unfortunately, this story has no streamers, but hold your tears because I think it's a quite beautiful ending. When the day came, I forgot my essays. I left my statistics at home and was forced to listen, forced to hear both sides. And I learned to validate a story that was very different than mine. A story that saw guns as protection and the only way to maintain liberty. My seventh period teacher grew up in Malawi, Africa, a missionary's son, whose life was forever impressed by a single event.
He witnessed the military strip away the firearms of a population, established oppressive government, only to have the government pluck off an insurgency of its own citizens using the same firearms apprehended on the pretext that this would end gun violence. Do you see how witnessing something like that could change a person? Do you see how that could change the way a person would view the world? My teacher's eternal truth told him that restricting access to firearms would spell tragedy, and open access would fulfill his desire to be safe, a desire that we all share. And I was forced to reexamine my own privilege.
I grew up never having interfered with guns or gun violence firsthand. Therefore, the concept of guns being more present in our society terrified me and still terrifies me. However, this story ends in commonality. Both of these stories are true and valid, mine and his. We are both attempting to fulfill our desires to be safe in the only ways that we know how to. We are both doing that very human thing, and the story does not end with him believing what I believed, or vice versa. And it doesn't have to. The important part is that we learned that conversations that don't change minds can still change hearts. Proof that the motto we learned in Facing History works.
I came to the conversation, having gained knowledge from opposing viewpoints. I listened earnestly and told my truth. And in listening and learning, I saw the humanity in my neighbor and wished only to extend that humanity to my greater community. Education, conversation, compassion-- the model always works. No matter how large the difference seems at first that I've learned that the difference is rooted in humans doing human things just like me.
Facing History tells me the origin of the difference, making me face the fact that a greater longitudinal history, as well as our own stories, shape our minds from the time that we are born. We drink from wells in which we did not dig. Every single time I hear a story, I see a person making decisions to feel safe, to feel loved, to feel included and do what's best for those who they are obligated to and themselves. They are doing that very honorable human thing.
We are humans, not of inborn difference, but humans with plastic, moldable brains changed daily by our environments. We are people living our lives every day in the best way that we know how to, humans susceptible into being tricked into lies like racism, homophobia, antisemitism, and xenophobia, but still able to transform with truthful education, conversation, and compassion.
Imagine a world where compassion was the rule. It's imperative that we put these tools in every single student's hands. Think of the atrocities that we could prevent. That is the value of Facing History. Facing History can teach us to all say, no, that man, woman, girl or boy, that person is not different. That person is human. And that person is human just like me. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
