More room for debate

So I participated in policy debate in high school and during the first few years of college. Each year, a topic, known as a resolution, would be passed by The National Forensic League. If you were on the affirmative team, you offered a case in support of the resolution and defended your proposal. If you were on the negative team, your job was to prove that the solution offered couldn't possibly work. Yes, we definitely were the nerdiest group of people, but we had more advanced social skills than the Science Club, and marginally better attire, so we weren't at the bottom of the misfit heap.

In some ways it was easier being on the affirmative team, because you knew what the case was going to be ahead of time. But blowing apart another team's reasoning was where the real excitement could be found (oh, yes I did just write that). One of the tricks of a good negative team, was to link the other person's case to a nuclear war. Through a series of arguments supported by sources, some sketchy, you would link one argument to another until the affirmative team's idea resulted in the decimation of society as we knew it.

Of course we all knew that allowing prisoners to continue hunger striking without intervention as a method to reduce prison population (yes, a real case that I argued in support of), wasn't going to trigger a nuclear war, but an affirmative team had the burden of proof, so one small crack in the case, theoretically off-kilter as it might have been, and you lost.

What strikes me most now, as I listen to the debates about health care reform and the demise of the public option, is how much the arguments sound just like those crazy debate briefs we researched. Death squads, financial collapse, bureaucratic implosion of the system. The problem is, these aren't esoteric policy debates argued by scruffy students.

And at the end of it all, nobody wins.

Worth remembering? Debatable.

I have lost a few more memories. Well, I didn't actually lose them, I threw them away. Every few years, I go through the childhood keepsake box and toss a few more items. I am finally down to one small box with the teddy bear I got at a police station in Switzerland, my parent's wedding cake topper, my baby shoes, a yearbook, and a random pile of news clippings.

This year I parted with the top speaker award that I won at a debate tournament in high school. It was a small wooden gavel with a little brass plate that said Third Speaker Emory '89. I won it at a debate camp I attended during the summer before my senior year. The camp was pretty expensive, but I my coach and I sold Krispy Kreme donuts to raise money to cover the costs.

The camp experience was a mixed bag, my debate partner and I were both from public schools and one of the coaches ended up handing over some of our best research to a couple of the private school kids who always placed at the top of the state competitions and toured the national circuit. Still, I remember being so excited about the award because the competition was pretty tough and I had big dreams of attending Emory University. Just six months later, about halfway through my senior year, I would find out that my parents couldn't afford the private university tuition, even with the partial scholarship I had already been awarded.

I wonder if I will remember any of that stuff now that I have tossed the gavel in the trash.

I wonder if I even want to.