Focusing on the good things

By Roey Rahmil

With all that's gone on recently, it's difficult to pick out a single most important issue and dispassionately argue it. With this column, I'm hoping to give you a glimpse into a world you may not be familiar with -- a little segment of high school society in which genuinely good people do genuinely good things. So let me set the scene:

The auditorium was packed. Nervous chatter dominated the air. Suddenly, triumphant music drowned out the crowd's murmurs. The curtain rose, and hundreds of trophies gleamed in the bright stage lights. The crowd went silent as the awards ceremony of the California State Speech Tournament began.

For the next two hours, hardworking high school students and their devoted coaches -- many of them full-time teachers -- received awards for dramatic monologues, extemporaneous speeches and impassioned debates they had been perfecting all year.

After the ceremony, almost everyone headed straight to a hotel ballroom for a dinner and dance; some took advantage of the disc jockey (creating awkward high school dance moments) while others, exhausted from three days of nonstop work, sat and talked quietly.

I've been coaching high school speech and debate for four years. I spent last weekend in Orange County judging rounds, tabulating results, giving reassuring advice and shuttling my students to and from our hotel. Apparently, sleeping was not on the agenda. And through it all, I was happy to be there.

The dozens of professional teachers who made the tournament possible deserve praise. They give significant portions of their lives -- often for laughably little, if any, extra pay -- to help students excel. Some have been involved with the activity for almost 50 years. They work tirelessly and often thanklessly, but they know that what they do can change people's lives. Thanks to their efforts, students find new interests and new motivation that will shape the rest of their lives.

Last week was hard. In the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, we all tried to make sense of an intrinsically irrational act. This proved to be a futile enterprise. The attendant frustration spilled over into policy debates about gun control, mental health policies and media ethics. These are important issues, and we need to talk about them. But if we only do so in the context of tragedy, I fear that we will never come to sound, workable conclusions, for our judgments will be surrounded by the powerful emotions we are all feeling.

So while we sort through the tragedy, I think it might be helpful to focus, if just for a moment, on other things -- in this case, by highlighting one of the good things that happens every day.

Roey Rahmil is a senior political science and philosophy double major.