Throughout his 12 years of Presidency, Franklin Delano Roosevelt acted surely, but prudently, recognizing his own weaknesses and taking actions to countermand them, maintaining candor with his nation. Few leaders that have come before or after him have dealt with issues so large or so lengthy, and fewer still have handled them well – with grace, compassion and wisdom.

Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action, and we have trusted only to rhetoric. If we are really to be a great nation, we must not merely talk; we must act big – Theodore Roosevelt.

When F.D.R. took office, the nation was ailing. Unemployment was at a historic peak, the banking system was faltering, and most were wanting for food. He spent his first one-hundred days in office proscribing policies that were to be the cure –ambitiously developing his New Deal, a clever and desperate ploy to revive the inert economy. The hundreds of agencies started by his administration provided relief, reform, and recovery. Several, including the FDIC and the SSS (questionable though it is), still do.

Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure – Confucius.

The same forethought that allowed F.D.R. to deal so aptly with domestic and economic reform propelled him to instate the first peace-time draft and to start lend-lease programs with the Allies. His fear of an inevitable war with domineering aggressor nations prepared the U.S. for the day Japan struck Pearl Harbor – the military was already in training.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing – Socrates.

Aware of his inadequacies and lack of omniscience, Roosevelt encouraged advice from the most competent minds in the nation, his “brain trust”, using the specific wisdom of professionals to custom-tailor his plans.

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness- Niels Bohr.

The fire-side chats were brilliant, reassuring and coaxing an anxious nation through the power of personal contact. Roosevelt worked with the press, not against them, to form an alliance that the people could rely on. With an easy-going, informal living-room manner, he won over the people’s support, and kept them well-informed of his policies.

In a leadership position, I too shall seek to be open to audit, prepared for the worst, and aware of the people’s will.
Like Roosevelt, I shall attempt to take quick, deliberate action against pre-existing problems, prevent future problems, maintain intimacy and honesty with those I represent, and solve international problems multilaterally.
Yet, with respect to Roosevelt’s august achievements, I will not actively emulate any leader. Modern circumstances call for innovation, not duplication; recognition, not worship.
The words of many leaders can provide a guidebook, and the actions of many individuals can form a historical outline, but it is the responsibility of self to discern the imperatives of the present.

In my youth, I was partial to Socialism, if only abstractly. When I was ten, I posited to my father a Robin-hood system of distribution where the poor would be well-cared for, the rich – beneficiaries. Everyone would have enough, I proclaimed, most would have surplus.
But Russia, he told a crestfallen ten-year-old, had tried and failed. There was no work incentive.
I understood, and revised my ideals.
The more I explored Socialism and Communism, through Marxist theory and Orwellian parody, the more I saw both the no-longer-ripe back-drop for an industrial revolution, and the omni-present vice of the state.
Reading Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, I began to acknowledge that such problems were innate but still harbored hope that there might be at least one perfect ruler to regulate distribution; eventually Cincinnatus, the only Roman dictator to prove absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, might be reincarnated and instate a system of mass prosperity.
To be fair, I was already angling for full-fledged Libertarianism – touting individual rights and reveling in Nozick’s moral “side-constraints” – when I finally read Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. The novel is “gi-normous”, a whopping one-thousand two-hundred pages and replete with redundancies, but Rand’s protagonists still convey the frightening potential of hard-working intellectuals sacrificed for their virtues, enslaved for their efficiency and innovation. Worse, the novel reconfirms the lethargy of the average citizen, the proletariat-staple of any welfare-state.
Dagny and John are the perfect anti-communists, proponents of not only individual rights but individual labor, with individual rewards. They value work for the sake of man’s achievement. They think taking one man’s labor to feed another man merely leaves two men who do not labor. They are both intelligent and passionate, seeking a society which fosters more intelligence and passion.
Yet, while an Objectivist Utopia is difficult to reject on the basis of pure efficiency and beauty, its pragmatic effects on the rest of the world are equally difficult to condone. It would have diligence, but it wouldn’t have sympathy or compassion. Like Libertarianism, it wouldn’t be able to accommodate the poorest, stuck in an involuntary cycle of poverty.
Accordingly, I once again revised my ideals to both consider Rand and fit an Earth where poverty is the norm, where more than half of Sub-Saharan Africans live on less than one US-Dollar a day: Help as many as possible, while sacrificing the fewest rights. Educate rather than give. Raise society’s base-line standard-of-living, and then allow individuals to help themselves.
At ten-years-old, empathy led me to embrace a short-lived Socialistic-epiphany. And though empathy continues to drive my political philosophy, Atlas Shrugged compelled me to finally and completely reject redistribution-theory as a plausible panacea for the world’s ills.

Originally, I was assigned to the library – that’s where the ballots were being handed to our judges. Truth be told, I was handling affairs well. I had successfully, if frantically, managed to get all of Round 1, Flight a, into proper hands, record the transfer, and get timekeepers to each room to boot.
It was only when, 3 minutes after the last judge left, I was given NEW ballots for Round 1, Flight a, to be filled out on the fly, I knew I was in trouble. Immediately, I sent a runner down to the Tabulation room. Why the change?
No real answer – both coach and sponsor were too stressed attempting to operate the finicky tournament-management software “Joy of Tournaments” to handle any other problems.
Ballot recall from thirty rooms – after rounds had already commenced – smugly promised absolute mayhem. I sent the runner back again to confirm; she returned intimidated. So I asked my helper to take over for a moment, and sprinted to talk to them myself.
After much ado, the ballots stayed out, but I was pulled from the library.
Flustered, I regained my equilibrium sorting and managing Tab. I wasn’t allowed to use Joy of Tournaments, that was my sponsor’s territory (meanwhile my coach was replacing me in the library, to my sponsor’s chagrin), but I was constantly accumulating data for rankings and breaks. Most importantly, I was the firefighter.
Nobody asked me to take over the job, in fact, nobody even voiced a need for it. But without a doubt, it was one of the most critical jobs at our tournament.
Because when nobody was looking, bossy old women with perfectly hot-rollered hair would try to sneak into the tab room and casually confiscate their schools’ ballots before they reached the coaches’ lounge across the hall. One or two of them must have gotten away with it – spreading the word, before I stepped in to tactfully inform them that after their ballots were promptly copied and then placed into the lounge, they could be taken at leisure.
The little old women snorted, “The power just gets to SOME people’s heads.” And with upturned noses they left.
But we still had our ballots, and nobody had screamed. Polite assertion was the only weapon I had against the selfish assiduity of bitter rule-breakers, and I utilized it mercilessly.
So it went. My sponsor fretfully rebracketed the Championship Policy break-lists so that two Brazoswood teams wouldn’t hit (go against) each other, and I made sure that the Westfield coach was able to get his student into a Poetry round on time, the extra Debate 1s roaming the halls were put to good use manning the concession stand, and all the postings were out punctually, if only just.
Originally, I was assigned to the library, but because I became the catch-all, our tournament ran smoothly.

NASA is an enormous, Houston-wide set of complexes bustling with diversity. Aeronautical engineers, software developers, and even Astronauts-in-training settle here, in Clear Lake, for ready access to the Johnson Space Center. My parents are not aeronautical engineers or hopeful-Astronauts, and while sometime in the mid-eighties my mother did contract with NASA as a software engineer, she has been focused in the private sector since long before I was born.
Even so, living here, she and I have become steadily accustomed to, even defensive of, a hetero-cultured, poly-religious society.
Houston, smoggy though its petroleum-refineries may leave it, is still a cluster of culture – not always art and music, but lifestyles and religions – and a magnet of intellect. It is here, in Houston, that I have found a conglomeration of kindred-souls, who, by virtue of their very being, have molded my world-view.
An abysmally low number of people outside my small haven (even the 4th largest city in the United States is small compared to the population of the entire Earth) see the potential of those outside their own kind. Even members of my extended family don’t always recognize the human dignity and worth of those separated from them by an imaginary, but surprisingly opaque, line. Bigotry freezes their hearts, egotism inflates their heads, and misplaced patriotism enflames their righteousness. Racism, sexism, “religion-ism”, sect-ism. They all blur together in the fury of one hatred, one misunderstanding. One lack of empathy.
I guard those who are different when I can – we all guard each other. But ignorance is the most wide-spread of all evils – a truth I have learned not from my community, but from the comparison of my community with so many others. A truth reinforced at debate tournaments every weekend, where I regularly see immature, culturally-inspired attacks vying for the judge’s pathos.
My friends can save themselves from the danger of ignorance merely by being open and altruistic. And they have, time and again. Our community has, in the spirit of science, questioned then accepted, and my friends and their parents have passed all the tests. But too much of society won’t give them a chance, drawing up the walls of prejudice tightly, like fingers over five-year-old eyes.
I would guard my friends forever, if I could. Save them from the burden of bias. Shelter them from passionate ignorance.
I will save them. Somehow, I will; I am certain. I will save them by passing policies which assume their equality and competence, and by expecting others to do the same. I will save them by proving that the mind is unique, but it is still the mind, regardless of its possessor. I will save them by showing that the brain hosts the mind, and the mind hosts the soul. I will save them by allowing them the opportunity to save themselves.
I will save them because I know that only a world which accepts them will be truly liberated, truly safe, truly honest. Only a world which accepts them will be open to progress. Only a world which accepts them will be able to cope with the dwindling oil supply, the Middle Eastern wars, the possibility of nuclear fallout.
Only a world which accepts them will be able to reach the stars.

It lay discarded there, on her crumpled teal bedspread. The book she had been reading, one of many Honor Harrington novels.
It lay discarded; she reached down to pick-up rouge from the entertainment center that she used as a make-shift vanity. Thick mauve smudges on her cheeks. Mascara clumps.
A façade of normalcy, of slow-witted materialism.
Still, through the dense powder she was transparent: timid, brilliant, and most dangerously – different. They – the conformists – saw through her ill-fitting subterfuge, kept to themselves.
More make-up, she constantly thought, another layer. Then they will talk to me, laugh with me, be my friends.
Wrong. The mists of make-up obscured only her own actualization: Self quivered, quaked, shivered under the burden of a presumed title, “odd.”
This was in 6th grade.
I knew her, for a time. When she spoke up in class (often, with the correct response), she was ridiculed. When she read for leisure (constantly, with few exceptions), she was decried. “NERD!” they – the followers – exclaimed. And she listened. Listened and tried to change, tried to fit, tried to hide behind trendy blouses and sparkly cherry lipgloss. They – the popular – controlled her self-image, assigned her a rank, designated her a number.
I knew her for a time, but she was not my type. I knew her for a time, and then we split. Split cataclysmically. Split instantaneously. Split permanently.

I split – cataclysmically, instantaneously, permanently. Split on my own because I chose to. Because I enjoy being intelligent. Because I enjoy setting my own trends. Because being similar is boring. Because nerdy is just-right.

I was in 6th grade when I split, from a conformist, a follower, a hopeful diva, to a brazen nerd, a budding writer, a proud reader. I was in 6th grade when I washed off the make-up.

Goodbye, might-have-been Lindsay.

Bombs crash. Wreckage spews turbulently among corpses and trembling homes.
Famine threatens life, leaving destitute, third world citizens struggling for subsistence.
No respite lingers from the maelstrom of our ignorance, violence, and apathy, no universal solution to temper our actions with kindness and common sense.
We can change it, if we try. If we think. If we care.

Build me a Chapel of the Mind.
A glass cube in the middle of verdant arboreal foliage, rustling leaves flirting behind every pane. Cool hard-wood floor demanding clarity. Sunlit silence offering amber hope.
A sterile New York loft, towering distantly over congestion on the rainy autumn streets below. Overlooking our modernized society. A society that runs on Slimfast and Coca-cola – it doesn’t require intellect, just caffeine. It doesn’t require thought, just warm bodies.
Build me a Chapel of the Mind. A serene sanctuary. A frank fortress, isolated in the midst of regulated pandemonium – a space for observing. A space for trying. Thinking. Caring.
Build me a Chapel of the Mind, and kneel to consider. To meditate. To pray. We’ll pray to humanity and the progress we’ll make. We’ll pray to intellect and the price that it pays. We’ll pray to humanity – together, we can end persecution, eliminate murder. Together, we can think of solutions.

Build me a Chapel of the Mind: forsake ignorance.
Build me a Chapel of the Mind: forgo violence.
Build me a Chapel of the Mind: forfeit apathy.

There we can worship individualism through mass empathy. There our separate worldviews can melt into one compassion. A single consciousness spiraling towards celestial actualization, leaving its corporeal prison and ascending to contemplation.

Catholic, Protestant and Jewish: the religious banners suffuse a strange sense of exclusion over the make-shift stage in Texas Lutheran University’s gymnasium, though that is not the intent of the Bluebonnet Girls State staff. In a program that encourages progress and diversity, little of either is shown – a quick look around the room reveals a disproportionate skew of ethnicities, and a cursory glance at the stage proves that the program has yet to proffer the hand of acceptance to religions outside the realm of Judeo-Christianity.
When applying for the program – advertised vaguely as a symposium on Texas state politics for future leaders – I initially intended to attend with one of my closest friends, Zayna, a Muslim. While she ended up spending her summer with relatives in Europe, Egypt and Lebanon, I was astounded to find that though Girls State was not openly hostile towards Islam, Hinduism, Daoism, or Buddhism, it did not anticipate participants from any of these religions – despite the growing racial and religious diversity of Texas’s largest cities.
This was and is a drastic mistake, both in Girls State and the world-at-large. On a purely practical level, a successful state, and more valuably, a successful nation, will require cooperation from most (if not all) sects, and must harvest all of its available talent – regardless of background. It must look past the superficiality of physical differences and past too, the Venus Fly-Trap, Tradition. It must grow and adjust – it must be plastic, and it must teach it’s successors to be equally so. The alternative is bedlam and dissent when the unrepresented choose to boycott oppression.
Any program teaching democracy – the Greek “rule by the people” – should know and respect such simple principles. Certainly, any program teaching democracy in America, where immigration has constantly altered the political equilibrium, should consider this idea rote, if not trite.
Still, when Girls State was founded over half a century ago, it was progressive – urging female participation in a system culturally, if no longer legally, barred them. But it simply hasn’t kept pace with the times – expecting Caucasians alone to qualify based on academic ability is passé in a society where Asian Americans are applying to the Ivy League at a rate that causes even white males to fare favorably against affirmative action.
But my objection is tinted with more than mere pragmatism – of my four best friends, only one, Sarah, shares my Caucasian, single-parent background. The other three span the cultural and genetic spectrum – the aforementioned Zayna, Ranjani – an Indian Hindu, and Mandy (Man-yi) – an agnostic, 2nd generation Chinese immigrant. These three girls alone are quintessential manifestations of the value of diversity – Zayna: Latin Club President, Mandy: NHS President, and Ranjani: captain of the Upper Certamen team and Ancient Geography, webmaster of the JCL, varsity captain of our Academic Decathlon team and trivia nerd extraordinaire. They are the future, as much as I or any other Girls State Citizen. They are leaders – compassionate, intelligent, strong – who represent the academic bourgeoisie of our nation.

There is a danger to knowledge. A subtle danger to knowing, a certain danger to the lack of it. There is a danger – revealed in the twisting machinations of manipulation and emotionless frigidity of pure facts. Mostly, there is a danger in the harshness of what others can lord over you.
There is a danger to knowledge – a danger to another’s one-sided knowledge – to what you cannot know. There is a reasoning intensity, a plea for trust, but knowledge is treacherous. Knowledge holds no allegiance, commands no code of honor. Even the truthful are at risk of being struck for their impiety, their inability.
And yet I revere knowledge – worship it, a child presuming to be a priestess in the secular temple of infinite sagacity. I revere knowledge – idolize it, audaciously hoping to understand the enigmatic.
There is a danger to knowledge, when it isn’t mine.

While a historical Jesus of Nazareth may have existed, there is no evidence he was the Christ. Proof may deny the potency of faith; using reason to critique the purposely irrational may be unfair, if not outright impossible. And yet, what are senses for, if not use? Why be able to analyze, if you should not? Using empirical evidence and my admittedly limited knowledge of psychology, I am able to reach certain conclusions.

I am a proponent of Judeo-Christian values, they provide a much appreciated moral framework from which believers base decisions – and the church regularly reminds constituents of their spiritual obligations.
Further, the idea of a Jesus – a theoretically perfect man: selfless, compassionate, infinitely forgiving, and omnipotent – gives Christians clear security and goals.
Other religious figureheads are similar – a means to show disciples, ancient and modern alike, how to live peacefully with one another; they are role-models given mythic status to incur the wrath of divinity on rule-breakers and non-believers.
This makes historical and psychological sense: before the advent of heavy reason and scientific inquiry, mere subsistence imposed violent hardships, and the mystic nature of even the simplest phenomena left the wisest soothsayers in awe. Hence, belief in the grandiose was less uncommon and of greater necessity.
Yet, there is backlash to the pristine obedience such religions command – a reason to depart from them and to move towards an individual enforcement of moral values: the carrot-stick mentality of an afterlife, while good for reinforcing moral standards, causes much tension among worried mortals. As grace and salvation are limited to singular and conflicting groups of people whose memberships are primarily composed of ‘God’s chosen’ – the culturally and environmentally pre-disposed – holy wars are the naturally resultant invalidation attempts waged by one religion on another.

So, are there other routes to the peace religions profess to defend, without the animosity which they inspire?

There are the Lockian ideals: life, liberty and property, and Nozick’s Libertarian vision of moral side-constraints – no action should be taken that will violate another’s rights; no harm should be done to another. If somewhat religiously inspired, they nourish no need for resentment.
Even more primal, however, there is the common human trait and ability of empathy – best summed up in the ‘Golden Rule’: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If I do not wish to be harmed or persecuted, others too, will not wish to be harmed or persecuted. If I would want food, water and shelter, then I will work to ensure others have those necessities. While the argument can be made that this is forcing westernization onto the world, that argument is defeated through pure Darwinian self-preservation: all humans wish to survive, and wishing to survive, they wish to excel, in order to be best placed for the propagation of their own genes. Therefore, they will accept any means of advancement. Further, the need to avoid harm and pain is a universal value, not simply a Western one, as all races grimace when tortured, and only the psychotic, emo, or especially kinky deliberately engage in masochism.

The only reason left to pursue religion in a progressive era, in an age yearning for peace, is personal contact with the divine. And yet, even among the most devout, there is never an absolute answer in prayer, only an innate knowledge of what should be done – a knowledge derived not from ‘conversation’ but from the forced focus on, and weighing of, morality. There is simply meditation with self and self’s own code of being, where “God” exists solely to impose an imperative on this routine self-acknowledgment of goals and wrongs done. Selfless and global, in retrospect, pious resolutions are clearly correct all-along, but put-off until there is such an audit.

If empathy can proscribe morality, and inner-peace is brought by honest reflection, what need is there for the intolerances of religion, which betray their own cause?

Throughout life, there is but one true goal: to develop static morals. To ascertain absolute “rights” and “wrongs”. To make black-and-white the fuzzy gray of universal beliefs. Other aspirations exist, but none with such urgency as this.
In his quest to belatedly uphold morality, Arthur Miller’s John Proctor sacrifices his life. The choice is not easy, nor will it be in our own lives. His reaction to injustice is not immediate, but unlike most, he does react.
Though the good citizens of Salem are being slaughtered by a ruthless, blind theocracy, he does not step out. Though the harbinger of disaster is his own affair with Abigail, he does not step forward. Though his servant, Mercy, admits to the fallaciousness of the witch-hunting scandal, he does not act.
He erred, and his later actions are repentance for this lethargy. In stark contrast with most tragic heroes, he recognizes the cowardice and contentment that had pinned him to inaction and is redeemed through pride instead of being destroyed by hubris. Instead of denying morality for life, he foregos life for morality – sinless, at last, in his noose.
While John Proctor proved that retaining individuality and being faithful to morality are causes worth death, few others can claim such dedication. Escalating complacency is deterring moral commitment and rendering the world honor-less. As Schlesinger argues, we are becoming too similar – unwilling to change and incapable of standing out. There is no longer space for heroes: they are called dissidents or vigilantes and are abhorred as different, or worse, politically incorrect.
In a rapidly homogenizing society, it is Proctor who is the voice of sanity. It is Proctor, who knew that to retain his panache and reinforce the bulwark of his morality he had to oppose Salem’s corrupt authorities. It is Proctor, who, like the Transcendentalists, knew that a man is measured through adherence to his beliefs.
Only if, in America, we stand like Proctor and condemn the moral discrepancies of our time will we be able to rest at peace with our consciences. Only if, as individuals, we choose to follow our hearts regardless of legal consequences will we have honor. And only if, as a people, we defend that which is “right” will we ever be able to die with our panache still fluttering a stainless white.