e Little River Review - Gorham High School!

Ellyn Touchette
�ink
Think
Hey listen.
Every single one of you was born with a gi�:
You are capable of taking in smells and lights and sounds
and producing a complex series of chemical reactions
that we all like to call thoughts;
and back in Da Vinci’s day a lot of folks
would take these things called thoughts
and use them to create greatness.
But 500 years was all the time it took for
our mental state to deteriorate and
now a person who thinks is about as common
as inhabited planets and we take what is told to us
and we accept it as doctrine truth.
I pose the same question to the closed-minded evangelist as
I do to the hard-headed anti-authoritarian atheist:
why are you not thinking?
Why did it not occur to either of you that the other
has some merit to what they are speaking about?
Why do you not look past the threshold of your
own purported omniscience and see that the world
outside holds out no answers upon silver platters,
and that anyone who claims di�erently is a liar?
I challenge you to swap shoes, hold hands and walk a mile.
We live in a country where we can dig holes and climb
mountains and walk away with the same perspective.
�is is a world in which the dazed stupor has become
the fashion market’s newest sensation
and even the world’s most brilliant scientists
are jumping onto bandwagons with reckless abandon.
I’m not telling you not to have a religion,
I’m imploring you to invent your own.
Build a relationship with your God that you feel is real
and rewrite the Bible according to what you know to be true.
I want you to write the gospel of YOU
and I want you to scream it to the clouds from the top of Everest
and sing it to the archaebacteria in the Marianas trench.
I want you to agonize for years, consider every possibility
and read every holy book and memorize the tenets of every
point of view since the dawn of man, and then I want
you to forget it all.
Use your brain, ladies and gentlemen. Open your eyes and
realize the lies that tempt and tantalize us on every street corner.
I can tell you that anyone who claims to have the answers does not.
Anytime someone tells you that they know what’s above us and below us,
what awaits us a�er death, what someone else is thinking or
what the universe has in store for them, smile politely and walk away.
�ey do not know. You do not know. And I know this,
because I don’t know either.
~ 22 ~