ITE "Enrico Tosi"

Speak up and be free!

Good morning ladies and gentlemen,
I’m Simone Pastori and today I would be glad to tell you why discussing make us human.
To be human seems to be quite a simple process. You just come into the world, you grow up and finally you get old. However, life is a more sophisticated concept. Indeed, the only way to be human is to be free. That’s not easy at all! Think about all the freedom people can take advantage of. But there’s one we cannot do without and that’s the freedom of speech and expression. That’s my point, freedom of speech and expression.
What would you do if you ever wanted to become a dictator? First of all, make people listen to what you say and make them do whatever you want, it doesn’t matter whether they agree or not. They are not supposed to complain, not even to think I would say. So please, let’s have a try! Imagine a world where people are not allowed to strike back. Actually, imagination isn’t required because that happened about 70 years ago in Europe. During the Fascist and Nazis era people’s minds were daily bombarded by nonsense about what was said to be “the importance of race”. Well, in that case Jewish and so on were sent straight away to the internment camps. Do you really believe that Fascists and Nazis let them account for their reasons? Obviously not. And why? All those Fascists and Nazis didn’t want to see reason because they were afraid of what they could have been told. For instance, a Jewish could have told them he was and felt as Italian as Mussolini was. So, what was the problem? The Fascist was so cruel that he didn’t even take into account one of the most important principles ever: the dignity of a human being. And for dignity I mean the possibility of showing your point of view and not being judged for this.
Now please try to focus on this point: people living in an internment camp were allowed neither to talk nor to strike back of course. And why? Because if you don’t let people tell what they want in order to stand up for themselves you are distorting them so that it looks like you’re torturing a number because all the victims cannot feel human any more. Anyway, you must feel guilty and remember you are not human because a debate, a reasoning, a discussion scares you to death and that’s definitely unnatural, too.
Up to now I have demonstrated how destructive the absence of discussion can be. But let’s now highlight how powerful a discussion is!
139 articles, published in 1948. Guess what it is. The Italian Constitution. You should know that the Italian fundamental law has been written by mixing up loads of different political ideas. Socialism, communism, capitalism and Catholicism are all included within a single constitution. How is that possible? After such a dark period, the 2^nd world war, people realized that cooperation and collaboration must be the two key words. Sure enough, all the Italian politicians discussed about the future of their country and they knew it was necessary to listen to each other, otherwise it would have been impossible to build up a brighter day. Thanks to the debate, they wrote down a pretty amazing Constitution which makes each of us a human because it guarantees all the essential freedoms, including the freedom of speech.
I’ll show you another concrete example: last October I went to Japan for an International meeting. There were 63 students coming from 21 different countries across the world. I talked with them, they talked with me. Nobody told us what we were supposed to say. We felt free to discuss. And so, what happened? We made that experience a bubble and that bubble was like an example of perfect world. Discussing is not a joke. We can really make a better world thanks to the debate!

To sum up, debating helps everyone develop a wider sense of social consciousness which is essential to set the humanity free.
And I’d like to give a suggestion: never let a non-human being shut your mouth, since he or she isn’t a human. I’d rather be a man, not a number or a thing. That’s why you should fight to get people to respect your ideas.
Just debate, never forget it! Trust me, it’s worth it!