I spent the morning in literally bone numbing cold at my sister’s college graduation at SUNY Purchase. I will keep this short as I am still trying to restore feeling to my left hand, but I was simply aghast at the total lack of organization and horrendous “motivational” speakers.
The president of the school attempted, in vain, to make a point about how events in one’s life that seem inconsequential may in fact be consequential. He attempted to do this, apparently, without the aid of a thesaurus. This resulted in a speech nearly 10 minutes in length of which fully 4 minutes were devoted to the repetition of the words “consequential” and “inconsequential”. He made some allusion to the Vietnam War and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but made no obvious connection between those events and the rest of his speech other than a vague and depressing one about how they represented the “real world”.
This masterful oration gave way to the introduction of NY State Senator Chuck Schumer who delivered an amazingly trite and self aggrandizing speech about the world and his contributions to NY State voters. The highlights of the speech were, as the title of the post suggests, a slip of the tongue which lead him to call the “Avian” or “Asiatic Bird” flu the “Asian flu” ( an ailment believed to cause the insatiable desire for General Tso’s Chicken ) and a completely ridiculous compound sentence which referred to “Rapid change”, “global warming” and “terrorism” as examples of things caused by technology. While there is probably a very erudite argument to be made for the relationship between technology and the activities of terrorism, I would doubt very highly that Chuck could either a) elaborate upon it or even less likely b) prove a causal relationship. This is representative voice of the people of New York? I refuse, at my young age, to believe that people in this state are truly that stupid and clumsy.
I seem to be able to move the small finger on my left hand again, so I am off to rejoice in a warm cup tea. I am left to wonder if the gradual numbing of my entire body was actually due to the cold, or the result of my brain shutting down in protest to the day’s barrage of banality.
