return to main site | return to sample speech
“Help Me Solve My Math Problem” John Graves Speech # 7, September 11, 2003
Fellow Toastmasters and friends, I’d like to
introduce you to some of the most famous equations of all time.
(2+2=4) This is one I’m sure you remember from
your kindergarten days, perhaps an expression of how simple life should be.
(E=MC2) Ah, this one plays a role in today’s
world, whether for good or ill.
(15 13 31 14 18) Hmmm. This isn’t exactly an
equation, but it’s a set of numbers that a lot of people are concerned about.
(Sept 11,
2001) Whoops.
My father’s birthday. When the World Trade Center was attacked exactly 2 years ago today, and he turned 76, My
Dad just rolled his eyes and said, “why did they have to do this on, of all days, my birthday?”
(PUT CARDS DOWN) It wasn’t long after September
11 that his health deteriorated. Six months later he was dead.
And when my father died a bachelor in March 2002,
he was flat broke, having long ago been struck by something as
threatening to us as any insidious foreign plot.
His retirement years should have been comfortable
ones. He had no rent or utilities to pay, plus a fixed income of
2800 dollars a month. But despite that, he was always in debt, and
frequently asked to borrow money from us just
to buy food.
Dad was secretive and in denial about his personal
problem. But he had an affliction that for him and
millions like him was as destructive as any terrorist attack -- only slower.
The California Lottery is what killed my father,
the state government’s numbers racket.
In investigating (scratch head) this very
hard to track down problem while my Dad was alive, I went to one of my
father’s favorite hangouts, a nearby gas station, where the proprietor
confessed my Dad owed him over a thousand
dollars. Dad had actually borrowed money at a high interest rate to buy more
lottery tickets.
It took me years to penetrate the shroud of mystery
surrounding this problem, which exhibited the classic signs of addictive
behavior -- such as a loss of interest in other aspects of life, even basic
necessities such as food and clothing -- so I sought help from Gamanon,
otherwise known as Gamblers Anonymous.
Doris from one of local chapters was eager to help,
but Alas, I was never able to get my Dad to go to a Gamanon meeting.
Doris asked if we had a family history of this
problem, I casually mentioned that, well, my wife has invested in private
companies of various types over the years, such as dental lasers and foreign
resort properties, and even I had become seriously involved at the time in the
trading of stocks on the internet.
And the Gamanon lady said (Hah!)
“You’ve all got it!”
Fellow Toastmasters, I am here tonight to talk
about a modern compulsion so basic to our way of life that we take it for
granted. It’s not about gambling, nor am I talking strictly about money.
You see, I’m increasingly convinced that we have
a problem with numbers.
Look, I know numbers are the savior of humankind;
numbers built our world. Every engineer, architect, banker, animator, musician,
actuary, and software engineer owes a debt of gratitude to numbers. Without
numbers the world would be in chaos.
But numbers also have a hypnotic power.
They seem to have the ability to rob us of our common sense.
Gordon Moore knows the power of numbers. Gordon
Moore, who invented Moore’s Law, another famous equation, which says that the
speed of a computer has to keep doubling every 18 months.
You’ve heard that computers are here to stay. But
is any one computer really here to
stay? Never.
The ever-greater numbers coming out of Silicon
Valley, as embodied in Moore’s law, dictate that every working citizen in the
world has to keep throwing their old computers into the world’s landfills. And
buying faster ones in an ever-spiraling pattern.
So in this machine-driven world, obsolescence truly
equals profit. Because you can’t argue with a number that keeps going up any
more than you can argue with a number on the stock market or a number tattooed
on your arm.
You can see the hypnotic power of numbers on Wall
Street everyday. You can see it in the lotteries and gambling houses that are
sprouting up all across America.
But
there’s more to our numbers problem than just money. Without the dehumanizing
power of numbers, it's impossible to fight a large-scale
war or send a ballistic missile to it's target. And surely numbers play an
instrumental role in any genocidal campaign, whether it be Turkey in 1919 or
China in 1962. Jews in Eastern Europe didn’t have letters tattoed to their
skin, numbers served this dehumanizing purpose.
Numbers are used by the IRS to create often
paralyzingly complex, confusing, and obscure stacks of paperwork for every
working American.
Numbers have a powerful, statistical, uncaring
quality that tends to shut down people's thinking processes and puts us in a
competitive mode. In much the same way that a professional athlete stamped with
a number on his jersey. . . suddenly is no longer an individual but becomes part
of a team. And numbers, especially large numbers, often make us feel powerless
to act.
And let’s take an equally prejudicial look at
letters.
You can never lead letters to the slaughter.
You can’t use letters to keep up with the
Joneses.
Letters brought us the Declaration of Independence,
the Bible, all the great teachings of the world. When mother and baby start
communicating with each other, they don’t use numbers, they use language. You
can’t teach morality or philosophy by using numbers.
And I shouldn’t hesitate to mention that
Toastmasters relies on letters and language as the foundation of our meetings.
So what are we to conclude from all this? I have
barely scratched the surface of this subject. I haven’t touched upon interest
rates, credit cards, federal
or state deficits, military spending, or many other numbers in our world that are going sky high.
There are two languages in our midst. At times, numbers seem almost invulnerable to attack from letters. But I urge you to remember how they are different. Beware the hypnotism of numbers. Remember that numbers games have just recently cost American citizens trillions, yes, trillions of dollars of their hard earned money. Every time you listen to a stock report, remember that you are being hypnotized in slow motion by the gently undulating back and forth motion of those numbers. Let’s try again to put numbers in their place, not as our masters, but as our servants.
-End
"Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform."
--Bertrand Russell
copyright 2003 John Graves
duplication or copying prohibited without written permission