During my senior year of high school, I participated in the local Lions' club student oration competition. The winner was bestowed with the near mythic honor of moving on to the regional competition in Lowell. I was one of the lucky three student chosen to compete at the local contest. The topic was, "What worries you today as a young adult?" Not to brag, but I was the betting man's favorite: my competition was two community college-bound girls whose grasp on real-world events was tenuous at best. I thought that the speech that I prepared was provocative, daringly original, and utterly sincere. It was about how the strip-mall-ization of my hometown was dangerously tearing apart the delicate fabric of our community, or some such bologna. As it turned out, I did very poorly, placing a distant third place, for several different reasons. First, I was terribly sick with the flu. I could barely stand up to deliver my speech; my painfully stuffed sinuses dulled my usually resonant baritone. Secondly, I only prepared a rough outline, planning to improvise the actual wording, instead of giving a wooden verbatim recitation. Because of my illness, though, I stuttered in several places as I was trying to transition between points. But thirdly and most importantly, I later learned that our Lions' club was made up almost entirely of developers! I didn't realize that the people I was ruthlessly slamming in my speech for tearing up acres of forests to put in $300k homes and allowing Home Depot and Walmart to destroy our local businesses (and who benefited financially quite well from all of this) were the very same people who were judging my speech. At the very least, I got $25 and a free roast beef dinner out of it, and I heard later on from my civics teacher that my speech made most of the squirm uncomfortably in their seats.