Police Seeking Sandwich Bandit

I made this post a week ago. Apparently Blogger decided it was not appropriate to post or something. So now I'm posting it for reals. A week later.


Time Travel back to one week and some change ago:


Last night, I stood in the most frigid room I've ever entered. I wish it had been a literal cold. Instead it was the less favored figurative cold.

I had to give my last speech for my speech course. It was not received nearly as well as I had hoped. My topic: The Unconstitutionality of Teaching Intelligent Design in Public Schools. So already, a super exciting topic.

Essentially, I took a paper I had written earlier in the semester and translated it into a speech. Plenty of credible sources, I even quoted the constitution and legal briefs. Rock solid.

My speech had three sections. First I explained what intelligent design was, then I explained evolution and how the rigor tested theory of evolution was superior to ID. I even went as far to explain the scientific method and how ID was based on faith. Since faith cannot stand up to the scientific method, it is not science. My logic train was going down a fairly safe path.

That is when the crowd started to turn. In fact, one guy in particular took it upon himself to scowl and shake his head at me through the entire speech. I'm not sure what he was trying to accomplish, except make me annoyed. It is important to note, this is the same guy who gave his first speech about how we need to power down the Large Hadron Collider because God created the heavens and the earth and we won't discover anything; God won't let us.

While something like this would waver the confidence of most, I simply became a little bit more into it. I wasn't pounding the pulpit by any means (maybe I should have) but I continued on. I explained the Endorsement and Lemon Tests (which I have talked about here) and then explained how time and time again ID has been proven unconstitutional to teach in public school, in particular I talked about the case in Dover, Pennsylvania.

I never got the crowd on my side. It was the first time I had ever spoken to a hostile audience. Adrenaline rush, yes, fun, absolutely not. Mostly because walking away, I felt I had not changed anyone's mind. It is just frustrating when an issue is so cut and dry to me, yet people still feel the need to disagree. I am so used to be surrounded by people who share my life-view, it is sometimes hard to understand why anyone would dissent.

Though, their dissension may have been a good thing. It has taught me to think harder about my stances. I gave an audience analysis before the speech and I found even before I gave the speech that the class would be a bit hostile to my stance. Most of them identified themselves as Creationists or ID proponents. This caused me to have to think my argument out much deeper than if all of them had been completely on board with ID being complete anti-science (which by the way, where the fuck did this 'don't trust scientists' movement come from? post for another day i guess).

For example, there is an acquaintance of mine who has an extremely far right stance on just about everything. As of late, whenever I take a stance on something, he is e-there to e-counter my stance. Most of my friends comment on his dick-headed-ness or asshole-ish-ness, however I find it useful. While I don't agree with him and I know I never will, he does force me to think about my stances.

If people didn't disagree with me from time to time, I would not take the time to rethink and reevaluate my stances. If this never happened, my awesomeness would wane. While I am right 100% of the time, if I do not stay sharp on being able to demonstrate my awesomeness, some lesser minded people may mistake me for being wrong.

So this really is just a thank you to everyone who is wrong about stuff. It makes me smarter. Keep it up.


As for the title, Firefox for some reason auto-filled it. I do not want to argue with Firefox.