A speechwriting exercise: Working together for a better world

(Inspired by TEDx Verona talk “Speak like a leader”, Simon Lancaster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGBamfWasNQ) ... and something from Wayne Swan)

Life is tough; life is a struggle; making ends meet has never been further away.

When life is so hard, it is so appealing, so attractive, so tempting, when someone promises to take the load off, to make it all go away, to make life as easy as it once seemed to be.

It is so appealing that we all become vulnerable.

We risk becoming like someone dying of thirst in a desert who sees the mirage of an oasis.

We could be that person dying of thirst on an ocean, who drinks salt water.

We could be like the alcoholic who turns to a lighter fluid, out of desperation.

Lighter fluid is great for lighting, but not for quenching thirst.

Giving responsibility to specialists with greater skills, like doctors or tax accountants or engineers, is good - in their fields. Giving away responsibility for our quality of life, on the other hand, is not.

The truth is life is complicated.

Running a modern economy, with all its connections to other world economies, is complicated.

A government for millions, with all the measurement and management and accountability, is technical, tedious, and incredibly challenging.

And taking our part in the slow, lengthy, sometimes tedious path to making our lives better is also incredibly challenging.

But it is the only way to be sure that we have a real chance of an improvement to our lives that lasts longer than an election cycle, that our children get to inherit a better world than we did, and that humans will still be here, in a meaningful way, in a million years.

This prospect is terrifying – it requires skills that we fear we do not have, it requires us to muster reserves of energy when we’re already exhausted, it requires us to persevere past disappointments.

But we’re not alone.

Others also want a better life for themselves, for their children, for the world.

Allow ourselves to admit the possibility of goodwill in ourselves, the possibility of goodwill in others, and the possibility of working together with good intentions, and we can share our energies and skills, and help each other through the hard times.

We need to collect ourselves and to collectivise, before we can collect our gains.

It won’t be easy: allowing goodwill requires listening with a willingness to learn and to change, but that is the first step in making the world a better place.

(This verges on the sort of writing and speech that I deliberately tend to avoid or minimise – I prefer to present the principles / arguments, and let those “speak for themselves” . . . which relies upon the audience having enough nounce to see through rhetoric-rich responses.)