I had always been destined to speak competitively, but no betting man would have ever pegged me for Extemp. Even I resisted the pairing. The first Extemp my mother had me give was preluded by an hour of me hunched over in her bathtub, fully clothed, surrounded by files and newspapers, trying to decide between figuring out who the hell Qaddafi was and prying open a second-story window. I don’t quite know how I ended up in the tub. The cold marble and safe seclusion helped, but I had made the drowning metaphor physically inescapable. What intellectual masochism convinced my 13-year-old self to ever indulge in that traumatic process again, I cannot say. But thank God I did.
The language of Extemporaneous Speaking had always been a well-kept secret. Extempers were elite, travelling in gangs with giant tubs of files resting on sleek dollies, Italian leather clacking along a foreign high school’s hall tiles. If you sat and observed …show more content…
What do you know about Africa?”
Africa. Africa had had a lot of violent overthrows lately. Libya. Okay. I could talk about how the AU could not possibly have responded to the coup appropriately because the most appropriate response would have been to prevent it in the first place, to look at what was happening everywhere else and take proactive action instead of coming in afterwards. I could tie it together with a metaphor—cookies! If you’ve got a child who is set on having a cookie, and I mean downright determined, the appropriate response is to get the child to exhibit some good behavior and reward them with the cookie. If you simply refuse the request and leave them alone in the kitchen, they’ll find a way to knock the cookie jar off the shelf, sending porcelain splinters all over the kitchen and leaving you with a dangerous mess to clean up. If the people of Mali were set on a change in government, the AU should have incentivized and facilitated a peaceful transition. Instead, no help came to Mali and a violent coup
The language of Extemporaneous Speaking had always been a well-kept secret. Extempers were elite, travelling in gangs with giant tubs of files resting on sleek dollies, Italian leather clacking along a foreign high school’s hall tiles. If you sat and observed …show more content…
What do you know about Africa?”
Africa. Africa had had a lot of violent overthrows lately. Libya. Okay. I could talk about how the AU could not possibly have responded to the coup appropriately because the most appropriate response would have been to prevent it in the first place, to look at what was happening everywhere else and take proactive action instead of coming in afterwards. I could tie it together with a metaphor—cookies! If you’ve got a child who is set on having a cookie, and I mean downright determined, the appropriate response is to get the child to exhibit some good behavior and reward them with the cookie. If you simply refuse the request and leave them alone in the kitchen, they’ll find a way to knock the cookie jar off the shelf, sending porcelain splinters all over the kitchen and leaving you with a dangerous mess to clean up. If the people of Mali were set on a change in government, the AU should have incentivized and facilitated a peaceful transition. Instead, no help came to Mali and a violent coup