Robert's Random Rants

Special Treatment

Alright kiddies, I originally posted this on another writing site (www.myadventuregame.com) that I go to much more often than here. I copy and pasted it after Cool suggested it would make a good RRR, so it wont be in the normal format.

Alright, so my slight absence the last two days ago was due to a debate tournament at St. James (a private school about half an hour from here) which was a very fun two day tournament. Even though I'm complaining right now, I had a great time, the staff was very polite and helpful, and the campus was beautiful. I participate in the Lincoln Douglass form of debate, and because this is my first tournament I'm in the novice bracket. There were 17 Lincoln Douglass debators in the tournament, and 4 of those were from the Prattville team (my team). The topic of the debate was "Resolved: A just society requires the recognition of animal rights".

Now that you guys know the background, I'll move on with the actual scenario. The first day of tournament was alright, my first round I won, second round I got the BYE (which I later learned there was a reason for), and third round I got beaten pretty badly. So I go home, look up definitions for the next day, and go to sleep. The next day I go in, and I debate a really tough opponent from Vestavia (who's renowned for their LD team around here) and (barely) manage to win. So my last match of the normal rounds comes up, and this girl's from Jefferson County (who was where the only girl who I'm sure actually beat me was from) so I was kinda scared, but I had good time and managed to win. I even managed to get her to say that retards didn't have rights during cross-examination which was my second-favorire moment of the day.

So I get back to the performing arts building, which was where the teams were assigned to meet before their rounds, and at this point I'm pretty nervous because I know I'm either 3/2 or 4/1 (none of the judges disclosed who won and the guy from Vestavia was the only person I didn't know if I won or lost agianst) so I don't know if I'm gonna break or not. Well, after a while things start to get boring and so a lot of the Prattville members go out to the courtyard to see Fergie (who is a very close friend of mine) and his partner Matt perform their due interperatation because we weren't able to see them perform it at the competition, and we're all laughing and having a good time when Chris (a former member of the team and a current judge) comes running out of the Performing arts building screaming "someone from LD broke, someone from LD broke!". So then my debate coach is really excited because Prattville mostly judge has an acting team (technically it's the "forensics" team, so it's not just debate) and our Public Forum teams just started getting recognized in the last couple of years, so a Lincoln Douglass team would officially put our debate team on the map. Well, coach O finally gets Chris to calm down enough to tell everyone that I'm the one to have broken to the semi-finals.

So now I'm really excited because I know that not only had I gone 4/1 but I'm the first person from Prattville history to go into the semi-finals. When I go into the room that was set aside for the Semi-finals I found out that the girl I'm facing now is from Jefferson County, so I'm convinced that they have a very good debate team because I also so the girl that beat me earlier go into the semi-finals as well. Although I was very nervous at first, this match was by far the best I've ever had, practice or otherwise. so I beat her by unanimous decision (we have 3 judges in quarter-finals, semi-finals, and finals) and become the first person in Prattville history to go into LD finals as well as the first to break. I headed back to the to performing arts building, and after some basic congradulations and small talk, I notice the girl who beat me 3rd round go to her team and so I go over to both congradulate my opponent in the semi-finals on her good job and to see if the girl who beat me was moving ontto the finals as well. Unfortunately I learn that she was actually defeated and the her opponent moved on to face me in the finals, so my thought process at the moment was "Ooooooh crap", and not much else seeing as the girl who beat me got defeated.

Finally it's called that we're supposed to go to the room and begin our rounds immediately. Well, contrary to my belief my opponent was actually a pretty big pushover. Her Neg's value premise was "Justice", which was normal for tihs topic, but her Criterion was "Maximizing Happiness" due to the fact that the point of justice is apparently to " make sure as many people are happy as possible", which is INCREDIBLY easy to negate. She also had two contentions in her neg, which would normally make her slightly harder, but her 1st contention was "Animal rights are harmful to animals" and her second contention was "Animal rights are harmful to humans" with barely any proof to back those statements up. Plus, her arguments against my case had practically no weight because I got her to agree to my definition of laws during cross-ex, and most of her arguments had to do with the fact that protection laws and animal rights are different. So at the end of the debate, both of her contentions, and her VC and VP are destroyed by my arguments (the VC and VP alone would normally mean I win anyway because without those two you have no case) and all 3 of my contentions are still intact and she never even questioned my VP or VC, so I definately should have won. However, when we go and go onstage to recieve our awards, they said that my opponent won by "unanimous decision". If you say the look on her face, you would have seen that she didn't think she would have won either.

So I spend a good amount of time beating myself up because I'm sure that there's that one argument that broke my argument that I either didn't address or couldn't properly refute, but I couldn't think of anything at all. I didn't find out why I actually lost untill we were heading back to the bus (after a while I attributed to typical anti-Prattville biase, but I was wrong). As it turns out, Whitehouse (the name of the school she was from) is actually in Tennessee, and St. James specifically asked them to come down and compete. After some asking around, I find out that people from Whitehouse won every competition in the tournament that they competed in, whether they deserved it or not. Apparently St. James felt obligated, which struck me as odd. Even when I asked Anakin about it (a guy on the LD team with me, and yes that's the name he picked when he came to America) on the way home, he just shrugged and said that it sounded about right. I asked him why and he just shrugged again and said that's what happened when the Prattville show choir was invited to Boston and the Prattville team dominated. But the bottom line is this: I don't care where teh group is from, everybody should be judged on how they do, not where that person is from.