RCL Blog 10

Personally, I believe that my TED talk was not great, but I don’t think I should be too mad. Recently, I’ve had a lot of struggles when it comes to public speaking, and I don’t know why. It’s probably psychological, but I’ve had a lot of struggles with public speaking and stage fright no matter how prepared I feel. The TED talk was no exception. I went in feeling confident and prepared, I even went to the studio beforehand to get comfortable with the area, but I still stuttered and stumbled over my words. I didn’t say a lot of the things I wanted to say, but I was able to get through it, so I’m proud of myself for that. I know there’s plenty of room to improve, but the beauty of life is in learning to get over weaknesses.

For our public controversy topic, our group had several ideas that I thought were good that could work for the project. One of my ideas for the group was the Depp vs. Heard case, which was very public and controversial, especially since it was originally public opinion that Johnny Depp was the abuser, and then the public switched sides and sympathized with him once all of the case details began to come out over time. Another idea I had that I thought could be good was the War on Drugs. Not very controversial at the time, but very controversial today. We could easily analyze the impact of the War on Drugs in terms of drug use and illegal activity, and also Ronald Reagans attack on black communities using CIA planted drugs to incarcerate an exorbitant amount of African Americans. The one we’re probably going to do though is the idea of defunding the police. The validity and effectiveness of the police has come under question many times over the past few years, so we can look at what the police do well and what they do badly and the best course of action we believe will be beneficial for the general public.